"US is 50% prepared for flu"

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http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/03/03/news/flu.php

			FRIDAY, MARCH 3, 2006		

							WASHINGTON
A top government health official here said that the United States was
only "50 percent" prepared for an avian flu pandemic, prompting
legislators to call for much more vigorous action to stop the spread of
the disease before it reaches U.S. shores.

In a congressional hearing this week on international preparations for
a pandemic, lawmakers pressed Dr. Julie Gerberding, director of the
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, to quantify the state of
U.S. preparedness.

She demurred at first, before adding, "I would venture to say we are
less than 50 percent, but we are 100 percent more prepared than we were
three years ago." She and other experts told members of a House
Appropriations subcommittee that even with a sharp rise in funding and
attention since the disease began an unexpectedly rapid spread around
the globe, preparations would take months or years.

President George W. Bush drew attention to the prospects of a pandemic
in October when he said he would ask Congress to spend $7.1 billion on
bird- flu preparations. Congress so far has allocated $3.3 billion,
much of it to stockpile antiviral drugs and bolster domestic
preparedness.

But Representative Nita Lowey of New York, the ranking Democrat on the
Foreign Operations subcommittee, said that "one of my top priorities is
to fight it over there," and other lawmakers agreed.

Gerberding and other specialists, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, director
of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, said that
their agencies and others were actively cooperating with national and
international public-health and wildlife officials but that worrying
gaps remained.

They said the United States should probably be spending more money to
help in Africa, where infected poultry were recently found in Nigeria
and Niger. They acknowledged that they were unaware what preparations
Mexico had made against an outbreak, though the flu could enter the
United States from there.

They told the panel that they simply did not know whether a program
China has announced to compensate farmers for chickens killed in mass
culls was being effectively carried out.

Moreover, one vaccine being administered to domestic fowl in Asia might
be dangerously masking the virus's presence without killing it, they
said.

They also agreed that critical gaps remain in the ability of many
developing countries to spot avian influenza. If the flu emerges in a
country that has no epidemiologist or laboratory capable of identifying
it, "then we'll miss the boat," Gerberding said.

Still, she said, a global surveillance network is growing.

Some countries have established primitive sentinel systems; Cambodian
villagers, for example, are being issued mobile phones and trained to
alert the authorities to suspect bird deaths. Workers in Nigerian polio
clinics are similarly being taught to report suspicious flu-like
diseases.

The flu has spread rapidly from Asia to the Middle East to Africa and
Europe, reaching more than 30 countries, killing thousands of birds
and, by latest count of the World Health Organization, 94 humans who
had come into contact with them. The specialists said it was impossible
to say if or when it might mutate into a strain capable of easy
human-to-human transmission.

The United States has allocated $280 million to help mitigate the
spread of the disease abroad, as well as $25 million to protect the
health of overseas diplomats and their families, and $15 million in the
event they require evacuation, said Dr. Kent Hill, assistant
administrator in the U.S. Agency for International Development.

The Centers for Disease Control has placed teams in 45 countries to allow quicker responses.