By DemFromCT
Thanks to Effect Measure (the public health blog where you can catch the latest news on bird flu), some small steps taken by the US Government suggest that someone, somewhere outside of the CDC is beginning to pay attention.
According to the AP, the feds will treat bird flu just as seriously as they treated SARS:
President Bush signed an executive order on Friday authorizing the government to impose a quarantine to deal with any outbreak of a particularly lethal variation of influenza now found in Southeast Asia.
The order is intended to deal with a type of influenza commonly referred to as bird flu. Since January 2004, an estimated 69 people, primarily in Vietnam, have contracted the disease. But Dr. Keiji Fukuda, a flu expert at the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, has said he suspects there are more cases.
The fatality rate among those reported to have contracted the disease is about 70 percent.
Health officials around the world are trying to monitor the virus because some flu pandemics are thought to have begun with birds.
Mr. Bush's order added pandemic influenza to the government's list of communicable diseases for which a quarantine is authorized. It gives the government authority to detain or isolate a passenger arriving in the United States to prevent an infection from spreading.
The authority would be used only if the passenger posed a threat to public health and refused to cooperate with a voluntary request, the Department of Health and Human Services said.
There are, indeed, more worries than just Vietnam. Thailand, N. Korea and other countries in the region might be even less equipped to deal with a massive public health issue than Vietnam. Resources are already strained, for example, because of the tsunami in Thailand, and N Korea has its own issues.
Effect measure also notes a vaccine plan in the works:
A more important development was the announcement that the Department of Health and Human Services had awarded a $97 million contract to pharma giant Sanofi-Pasteur to accelerate its transition from egg-based to cell culture influenza vaccine system. Teams are being assembled at facilities in Swiftwater, PA and Marcy L'Etoile, France to increase vaccine manufacturing capacity in the event of a pandemic. It is a five year plan with most of the work to be done in three years. Three years. I hope we have that long.
We all share that hope. This is rapidly becoming an issue too big for partisanship (although there's always room for that incriticising the health authorities for being so slow (relative to Canada and other industrialized countries). But these steps do indicate that someone's beginning to pay attention. And not a moment too soon.
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