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Officials Say U.S. Still Short on Bird Flu Vaccine

Posted on: Tuesday, 3 January 2006, 15:00 CST

By The Associated Press

WASHINGTON - The U.S. is making fast progress in preparations for a bird flu pandemic, including measures to close down schools and quarantine the sick, but vaccine supplies remain inadequate, health officials said Sunday.

"We've got a lot of work to do," said Julie Gerberding, director of the national Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, citing "bottlenecks" in vaccine production and the delivery of health care if there's an outbreak.

"We've got to get more and better anti-viral drugs. And we've got to have every single link in our public health system as strong as it can be so it can detect this problem," she said on CBS' "Face the Nation."

A strain of a bird flu that has killed more than 70 people in Asia since it first appeared two years ago has sparked concerns of a super-flu that could kill millions worldwide. Almost all the victims were in close contact with poultry.

While stressing that chances remain slight, health experts have said it could lead to a global pandemic if the bird flu mutates to start spreading easily among people. The U.S., which has not seen any signs of the strain in birds or people, has only enough doses now for 4.3 million people.

Gerberding said some immediate measures to combat the flu in the U.S. and worldwide would include isolating the sick and their immediate contacts. That might entail closing schools, large meetings or otherwise separating the afflicted from the rest of the community.

But she added: "I don't think any of us are thinking about those kinds of Draconian measures to really completely quarantine a community or even quarantine a country."

President Bush last week signed a bill that gives $3.8 billion to prepare for bird flu and liability protections for flu drug manufacturers.

Source: Record, The; Bergen County, N.J.

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