Pandemic flu could add up to many Katrinas
http://www.lamonitor.com/articles/2006/12/13/headline_news/news02.txt
Talk on avian flu paints starker picture
ROGER SNODGRASS Monitor Assistant Editor
A presentation about the latest technical knowledge on avian influenza opened with a warning that technical approaches to combating bird flu pandemic might not be as effective as an informed public.
While admitting their own friendly disagreements and the uncertainties of their disciplines, a team of scientists stopped short of saying, "you're on your own," but implied that might yet be the case.
Gary Resnick, division leader for biosciences at Los Alamos National Laboratory, introduced a round of presentations by three influenza specialists, beginning with a reminder that a Surgeon General during the mid-1960s had pronounced victory over infection diseases.
Resnick's timeline of human progress with respect to infectious diseases showed a brief period of "unbridled anticipation and expectation," preceded by millennia of ignorance, all followed by our current era of fear.
Out of respect for the enemy - the microbe - Resnick's main hope was that people would be able to know enough to interpret the daily headlines when the crisis arrives.
As the new research synthesized in the lecture confirmed, there is a war going on between humans and microbes.
The relentless toll of the AIDS epidemic, now killing nearly 3 million people a year, not to mention the highly deadly frights from Asian flu in the '50s and SARS outbreak in 2003, will all potentially become dwarfed if avian flu, a virus that has so far been mainly found in birds, becomes modified to spread from human to human.
As of Nov. 29, according to the World Health Organization, there have been 258 cases of avian flu infection in humans, of whom 154 have died.
Much of what the world thinks it knows about influenza, the scientists are realizing, is unreliable or inadequate.
What were thought to be the basic migratory routes are no longer as simple as they once seemed, noted Jeanne Fair, whose talk on the environmental factors and the logistics of disease transmission set the stage for the current international concerns. The avian flu has spread from five to 55 countries in the last year and a half, she said, but none so far in North or South America.
Some birds are more likely carriers than others. Ducks are good. Pigeons can be packed full of the H5N1 virus responsible for avian flu and won't show a symptom or infect anything else, she said. Pigs are suspiciously capable of hosting viruses that can mix or mutate into new strains.
"It is the first time in human history we have been given this opportunity,"
Fair added, "Never before have we been able to prepare."
Preparations were covered in two other short talks, one by Ruy Ribeiro on the microscopic process of infection. There are known defenses against viral infections, starting with the body's own immune system, but including medical vaccines and therapeutic antiviral drugs, he said.
On a systems level, discussed by Norman Johnson, a forest fire in which each burning tree lights only one other tree will burn itself out relatively quickly, but even slightly higher levels of intensity compound rapidly in a populated landscape.
Similarly, slowing down the rate of infection can sharply reduce the consequences of a pandemic, he said, showing animated examples from the laboratory's computer simulations.
Under an extreme situation, the country is looking at massive disruptions, horribly overloaded medical capacity and millions of dead during a few weeks of rampage, and then the unthinkable aftermath of that.
Unfortunately, as a new report on Monday from the Centers for Disease Control pointed out, "(T)he United States may soon face a pandemic in which neither vaccines nor sufficient antivirals will be available to protect the public."
"The cavalry will not be here from the federal government," Resnick said. "A year ago I wouldn't have said that, but everything you read now accepts that fact."
The moral of the talks was that more responsibility on the local level would be required. That's why public information has become more urgent than ever. Potentially large numbers of individual lives may depend on political and personal decisions made at the state and local level, right down to their neighborhoods and homes.
The talk Tuesday night at the Duane Smith Auditorium was a part of the Frontiers in Science series, one of the laboratory's outreach programs for the communities of northern New Mexico.
