USA National Pandemic Flu Plan Soon To Be Approved

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Main Category: Bird Flu / Avian Flu
Also Included In: Public Health
Article Date: 16 Apr 2006 - 10:00 PDT

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A national flu pandemic plan will include such contingencies as allowing some nations to print dollars if American mints grind to a standstill, deciding who gets vaccinated first and enhancing the capacity of the internet to deal with a surge of people who would be working from home.

International travel restrictions would be set up if an outbreak occurred abroad.

Drive-through centres would be set up where concerned people could quickly find out whether or not they are infected.

According to a new document, 240 pages long, soon to be signed by President Bush, a serious flu pandemic could kill up to 1.9 million American people. Officials say the plan is still being perfected.

The US government is determined to show its citizens it has a comprehensive pandemic-flu plan after public confidence was seriously dented as people witnessed confusion and delays during and after the Katrina disaster.

A serious flu pandemic could place a nation in a state of emergency for about one year and a half, say many health experts (and economists). According to several experts the USA is not prepared for such an event. Perhaps this new document may allay people's fears.

Crucial contingency decisions still have to be made. For example, do you use antiviral drugs to protect front line health workers, or might it not be better to use them for people with flu-like symptoms and those who live with them?

The plan envisages keeping nearly two million strategic people healthy (federal workers), schools may have to close, traffic controllers would be moved to priority centres, people would not be allowed to congregate in large numbers, some retired people would be called up.

Antiviral stocks will have to reach 51 million doses within the next two years - currently, they stand at 5 million doses of Tamiflu.

The USA is heavily dependent on the imports of latex gloves from the Far East. There are talks of stockpiling huge amounts of these gloves.

According to most scientists, the H5N1 bird flu virus strain is expected to mutate at some time or another. The question is no longer 'if' it will evolve (mutate), but rather 'when'.

Why don't infected humans easily infect other humans?

For the H5N1 strain to make a person ill it has to reach deep down in the lungs - a difficult place for the virus to get to. If a person is ill and infected, his/her coughs and sneezes are virtually free of H5N1. Because it is so deep down it is not expelled during a sneeze or cough. That is why humans cannot catch it from other humans (there have been some cases, but they are extremely rare and you need to be with a sick person, touching them, for many days).

How could the virus mutate?

For H5N1 to be able to spread from human-to-human it would have to make a person ill by infecting the upper-respiratory tract (nearer the throat). Then, if a sick person sneezed, the air would be full of expelled viruses.

However, if the virus infects the upper-respiratory tract, it will be much easier to treat.

The most likely scenario

If H5N1 mutates so it becomes easily transmissible among humans, it will also be easier to treat because it will not be infecting so deep down in the patient's lungs. Therefore, a human flu pandemic would probably involve an illness more powerful than present human flu, but not as deadly as the present H5N1 virus. This is how the theory goes. Sometimes nature does not do what we expect.

Written by: Christian Nordqvist
Editor: Medical News Today


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