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The Race Against Avian Flu
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| Contributor | ArmyDem |
| Last Edited | ArmyDem Oct 12, 2005 10:19pm |
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| Category | News |
| News Date | Thursday, October 13, 2005 04:00:00 AM UTC0:0 |
| Description | Public-health officials have been sounding the alarms, and now Washington has caught the bug. Meanwhile, scientists search for a vaccine.
By Jerry Adler and Anne Underwood
Newsweek
Oct. 17, 2005 issue - In the calendar of natural calamities, flu season follows hurricane season, peaking in midwinter. Last week, with New Orleans still mostly uninhabitable, Washington was turning its attention to the threat posed by an exceptionally lethal strain of flu virus that could, in the worst case, kill as many people in a few months as AIDS has done in two decades. This time officials were resolved not to repeat the mistakes of Katrina, leaving the way open to make new mistakes. We now know better how to evacuate large cities—but how much good will that do in an emergency that calls for a quarantine instead?
At least no one could accuse the government of downplaying the threat: President Bush himself raised the possibility of using the military to contain a flu outbreak, while the Senate voted to spend $4 billion on preparations. Researchers have developed a promising vaccine that is now beginning large-scale production. But new fears arose last week when scientists announced they had reconstructed an actual living copy of the "Spanish flu" virus that killed 20 million to 50 million people in 1918. Apart from the implication that a terrorist could do the same thing, the disturbing news was that the culprit was essentially a bird virus which had undergone only "minimal changes to infect humans directly," according to microbiologist Terrence Tumpey of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (More common, and less lethal, flu outbreaks are caused by germs that are a hybrid of mammalian and avian viruses.) As Tumpey points out, that is also a pretty accurate description of the H5N1 flu virus that has been circulating in Asia since 1997. (It is not related to the SARS outbreak of 2003.) |
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