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Companies Offer Wares to Guard Against Spread of Bird Flu

Posted on: Tuesday, 28 February 2006, 09:25 CST

By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Correspondent

ALEXANDRIA, Virginia -- Worried that a courier might deliver avian flu along with that book you ordered to pass the time while you wait out the pandemic?

Melissa Blankenship, director of sales and marketing for Friendship Industries Inc., has just the product for you.

"You could easily wear these while using a keyboard," she said, demonstrating a thin, blue flexible glove. "And if the UPS (United Parcel Service) man comes, for instance, you can put this on for outside protection," she says, holding out a slightly thicker glove.

Companies are gearing up to help protect health care workers and the public in case of a bird flu pandemic, offering portable isolation units, packs with gloves, masks and suits and sanitizing systems.

They demonstrated their wares on Monday at the Bird Flu Summit organized by meeting specialist New-Fields.

H5N1 avian influenza has moved steadily across Europe in recent weeks and into parts of Africa, after moving out of southeast Asia for the first time last year. It has killed or forced the slaughter of more than 200 million birds and is beginning to damage the poultry industry in some countries.

It does not yet easily infect people but it has sickened 173, by official World Health Organization count, and killed 93 of them. Experts fear it could change into a strain that easily passes from person to person, causing a pandemic.

Public health specialists predict that, if it did, it could infect up to a third of the population in the space of a few weeks, wreck economies, force schools and businesses to close and overwhelm hospitals.

But simple hygiene measures and a little protective equipment could go a long way to guarding against infection, and distributors of these products report a steep rise in interest in recent weeks.

SOARING SALES

"Sales have gone up by several million dollars," said Bob Risk, of New Jersey-based Aramsco, which supplies chemical and biological weapons protective kits.

They are stepping up production of kits that include gowns, a mask, booties, goggles and gloves, as well as a quick diagnostic test that can tell if someone has influenza in half an hour. One kit is marketed to hospitals and clinics, and a similar one to companies seeking to protect employees.

"Business has increased. But also, the number of returned phone calls has increased -- people who said 'I'll call you' are actually calling back now," Risk said in an interview.

Blankenship said factories in southeast Asia are being re-fitted. "The companies that are making shirts for Wal-Mart, we need them to convert to making personal protective gear," Blankenship said.

Her company is checking out potential factories in China, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines.

For $14,000 your clinic can buy Collective Protection Engineering Co.'s IsoArk collapsible isolation chamber, a clear plastic room-sized enclosure that provides negative air pressure, meaning air and thus viruses and bacteria cannot escape.

It has a glove box -- an enclosed pair of gloves, attached to a flexible plastic window -- through which a patient could be tended to with no direct contact.

The company's Darryl DeMaris said there had been a 200 percent increase in sales in the past 6 months.

"Before six months ago we'd sell maybe one every two months," he said. "Now it's two, three, four a month."

Source: REUTERS

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