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Global fight on bird flu redoubled
By Elisabeth Rosenthal International Herald Tribune
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 16, 2005
ROME As World Health Organization officials repeated warnings about the potential for a deadly bird flu pandemic and President George W. Bush proposed an "international partnership" to combat the disease, wealthier countries around the world are redoubling efforts to purchase an experimental vaccine and antiviral drugs in the hopes of protecting their own citizens from infection.
"We cannot afford to face the pandemic unprepared," said Lee Jong Wook, the director of the WHO, at the United Nations on Thursday. The UN agency and the European Union have been urging countries for months to prepare for the possibility of a future human pandemic caused by the bird flu virus, even as they have acknowledged that there is no current risk: The virus, A(H5N1), which has killed millions of birds, only rarely infects humans and does not normally spread from person to person - a basic requirement for human epidemics.
But scientists are worried that it could someday acquire that ability through Faced with the unprecedented damage caused by Hurricane Katrina, calls for better disaster planning against disease seem to have taken on new urgency.
This week, the United States announced that it had placed an order for $100 million worth of a promising but still technically unlicensed vaccine that is under development by the French drug maker Sanofi-Aventis. Italy announced that it had contracted to order 35 million doses of vaccine and other medicines.
Roche Pharmaceuticals was struggling to fill huge recent orders from 30 jurisdictions for antiviral drugs, said Martina Rupp, a spokeswoman for the company, based in Basel, Switzerland.
These include Australia, France, England, Singapore and South Korea, as well as Hong Kong.
"We have learned in the past weeks that bad things can happen very fast," said Michael Leavitt, the U.S. health and human services secretary, as he explained the need for the new partnership to fight bird flu proposed by Bush, whose administration has been widely charged with being unprepared for the hurricane and its aftermath.
In fact, experts said, rational planning for the possibility of a worldwide pandemic is in many ways even more challenging than planning for a Category 5 storm, because the vaccines are novel and the drugs have not been used in this capacity before.
But as countries spend tens of millions to prepare for bird flu, they are investing in uncertain and untested strategies, even WHO officials acknowledge.
The basic problem is that the A(H5N1) virus has not yet changed in any way that would allow for widespread human infection. What is more, health officials and scientists say, they cannot be certain about the exact feature of their enemy or the disease it produces until after it does.
"We know we're overdue for an influenza pandemic strain and we know it will occur, but we don't know when or even exactly what virus will cause it," said Dick Thompson, a spokesman for the WHO.
He added, "It is possible that the virus won't be H5N1 at all or that this virus will change in a way so that the vaccine under development doesn't work against it."
He said the WHO would not comment on whether it was rational for countries to be spending so much on medicine orders. But, he added, "we think it is wise because it encourages the companies to do the research and development on this very difficult problem."
The potential for the spread of the bird flu virus among humans has long worried health authorities, because the virus has a couple of characteristics that make it capable of igniting a serious pandemic: It is a new strain, so humans have no defenses against it; and it produces severe disease, killing about half of those humans who have been infected, almost all through contact with sick birds.
"At this point H5N1 has pandemic potential, but it is not a pandemic virus," Thompson said, because it does not spread easily among humans.
But flu viruses are prone to mutation and exchanging genetic material when they co-infect an animal. One big fear is that an ordinary human flu virus and the bird flu virus could mix genes, creating a new type of lethal human bird flu virus, if they were present in an animal at the same time.
Because many viruses only attack certain species, this would most likely only occur in humans or pigs, scientists say.
But no one knows how likely this is. If it happened, the WHO estimates that it could kill 2 million to 7.4 million people worldwide. Others have made estimates in the tens of millions.
Still, many are preparing for the worst. "It is not a matter of if, but when, avian influenza will strike Italy," said the Italian health minister, Francesco Storace, this week, in explaining Italy's purchases.
To prepare for the possibility of human bird flu, governments are racing to purchase the only two types of medicine known to have potential against the disease.
The first is a novel vaccine in the final stage of clinical tests. In tests, it elicits an immune response in humans against the A(H5N1) virus, but it takes two shots and requires a large dose, making it difficult to predict how well it would perform in the case of a sudden aggressive outbreak. The vaccine takes months to make, and all bets are off if the A(H5N1) virus variant that infects humans turns out to have changed substantially from the avian version.
The second strategy countries have employed is to purchase one of several antiviral drugs that are known to shorten the duration of influenza among those already infected and to reduce the likelihood of serious and deadly complications.
Treatment, however, must be started within 48 hours of infection. Also, they have shown only limited efficacy when they have been used to treat a few humans with bird flu in Asia, Thompson said, although they were mostly tried in people who were extremely ill. But many European countries are ordering huge supplies of such drugs, often enough to treat a third of their population.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/09/16/news/flu.php
By Elisabeth Rosenthal International Herald Tribune
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 16, 2005
ROME As World Health Organization officials repeated warnings about the potential for a deadly bird flu pandemic and President George W. Bush proposed an "international partnership" to combat the disease, wealthier countries around the world are redoubling efforts to purchase an experimental vaccine and antiviral drugs in the hopes of protecting their own citizens from infection.
"We cannot afford to face the pandemic unprepared," said Lee Jong Wook, the director of the WHO, at the United Nations on Thursday. The UN agency and the European Union have been urging countries for months to prepare for the possibility of a future human pandemic caused by the bird flu virus, even as they have acknowledged that there is no current risk: The virus, A(H5N1), which has killed millions of birds, only rarely infects humans and does not normally spread from person to person - a basic requirement for human epidemics.
But scientists are worried that it could someday acquire that ability through Faced with the unprecedented damage caused by Hurricane Katrina, calls for better disaster planning against disease seem to have taken on new urgency.
This week, the United States announced that it had placed an order for $100 million worth of a promising but still technically unlicensed vaccine that is under development by the French drug maker Sanofi-Aventis. Italy announced that it had contracted to order 35 million doses of vaccine and other medicines.
Roche Pharmaceuticals was struggling to fill huge recent orders from 30 jurisdictions for antiviral drugs, said Martina Rupp, a spokeswoman for the company, based in Basel, Switzerland.
These include Australia, France, England, Singapore and South Korea, as well as Hong Kong.
"We have learned in the past weeks that bad things can happen very fast," said Michael Leavitt, the U.S. health and human services secretary, as he explained the need for the new partnership to fight bird flu proposed by Bush, whose administration has been widely charged with being unprepared for the hurricane and its aftermath.
In fact, experts said, rational planning for the possibility of a worldwide pandemic is in many ways even more challenging than planning for a Category 5 storm, because the vaccines are novel and the drugs have not been used in this capacity before.
But as countries spend tens of millions to prepare for bird flu, they are investing in uncertain and untested strategies, even WHO officials acknowledge.
The basic problem is that the A(H5N1) virus has not yet changed in any way that would allow for widespread human infection. What is more, health officials and scientists say, they cannot be certain about the exact feature of their enemy or the disease it produces until after it does.
"We know we're overdue for an influenza pandemic strain and we know it will occur, but we don't know when or even exactly what virus will cause it," said Dick Thompson, a spokesman for the WHO.
He added, "It is possible that the virus won't be H5N1 at all or that this virus will change in a way so that the vaccine under development doesn't work against it."
He said the WHO would not comment on whether it was rational for countries to be spending so much on medicine orders. But, he added, "we think it is wise because it encourages the companies to do the research and development on this very difficult problem."
The potential for the spread of the bird flu virus among humans has long worried health authorities, because the virus has a couple of characteristics that make it capable of igniting a serious pandemic: It is a new strain, so humans have no defenses against it; and it produces severe disease, killing about half of those humans who have been infected, almost all through contact with sick birds.
"At this point H5N1 has pandemic potential, but it is not a pandemic virus," Thompson said, because it does not spread easily among humans.
But flu viruses are prone to mutation and exchanging genetic material when they co-infect an animal. One big fear is that an ordinary human flu virus and the bird flu virus could mix genes, creating a new type of lethal human bird flu virus, if they were present in an animal at the same time.
Because many viruses only attack certain species, this would most likely only occur in humans or pigs, scientists say.
But no one knows how likely this is. If it happened, the WHO estimates that it could kill 2 million to 7.4 million people worldwide. Others have made estimates in the tens of millions.
Still, many are preparing for the worst. "It is not a matter of if, but when, avian influenza will strike Italy," said the Italian health minister, Francesco Storace, this week, in explaining Italy's purchases.
To prepare for the possibility of human bird flu, governments are racing to purchase the only two types of medicine known to have potential against the disease.
The first is a novel vaccine in the final stage of clinical tests. In tests, it elicits an immune response in humans against the A(H5N1) virus, but it takes two shots and requires a large dose, making it difficult to predict how well it would perform in the case of a sudden aggressive outbreak. The vaccine takes months to make, and all bets are off if the A(H5N1) virus variant that infects humans turns out to have changed substantially from the avian version.
The second strategy countries have employed is to purchase one of several antiviral drugs that are known to shorten the duration of influenza among those already infected and to reduce the likelihood of serious and deadly complications.
Treatment, however, must be started within 48 hours of infection. Also, they have shown only limited efficacy when they have been used to treat a few humans with bird flu in Asia, Thompson said, although they were mostly tried in people who were extremely ill. But many European countries are ordering huge supplies of such drugs, often enough to treat a third of their population.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/09/16/news/flu.php