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Officials Discuss Need to Prepare for Possible Flu Pandemic

Posted on: Tuesday, 8 November 2005, 09:01 CST

By Mark Sommer

The United States needs to be better prepared -- and soon -- for a flu pandemic, regardless of whether the avian bird flu that began in Asia and spread to several continents mutates.

That was the view shared by local public health officials and university researchers at an hourlong gathering convened Saturday by Rep. Tom Reynolds, R-Clarence, at the University at Buffalo's Center of Excellence.

"It's clear that whether it's avian flu or whether it's another influenza, there will be a pandemic," said Dr. Timothy Murphy, professor of medicine and chief of infectious diseases at the UB. "There have been three in the past century, so we're due; in a sense, we're overdue."

Reynolds, who said he wanted to hear from "the experts on the front lines," touted the $7.1 billion plan announced last week by President Bush to boost the country's ability to deal with a pandemic. He also noted work by the Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics and Life Sciences to streamline the approval process of vaccinations from development to application.

Dr. Scott Zimmerman, director of Erie County's Public Health Laboratories, Epidemiology and Environmental Health, said he is hoping resources will reach the local level after cuts in recent years in public health infrastructure.

But Zimmerman conceded even more resources may not be enough. "We're talking about developing plans where we can immunize every person in Erie County -- nearly a million people -- in five days."

"What we've learned from some of the exercises and drills we've been involved with is that we'd probably need 4,000 people to actually administer the shots -- and we don't have 4,000 people," Zimmerman said.

Reynolds agreed immunizing that many people in a short time would be daunting. "That's an undertaking I can't comprehend in itself," he said.

As it is, the most effective antiviral drug that could be administered in the event of a pandemic, Tamiflu, is in short supply. Producing a vaccine would have to wait until the correct strain was identified, typically a slow process.

Zimmerman said public education is needed to inform people why quarantine and isolation would be necessary in the event of a large- scale epidemic.

"If the local health official says that we want to quarantine folks who have certain symptoms for 10 days, we'd like to do that on a voluntary basis so that people will just do it, rather than force them to do it through the military or whatever," he said.

e-mail: msommer@buffnews.com

Source: Buffalo News

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