American Health and Human Services Secretary, Mike Leavitt, says that scientists at the National Institute of Health have created a vaccine that can protect a human being when given in proper dosage. He told a Senate hearing that the scientists had worked with data collected from the 1997 Hong Kong outbreak.
The big problem is producing enough of it in time. Leavitt said we lack the capacity.
Experts around the world are not talking any more about whether a flu pandemic will strike, they are talking about when.
For the virulent bird flu virus strain, the H5N1, to become a major threat to global human health it will have to mutate so that it can spread from human-to-human. At the moment it is not easy for humans to catch it from birds, it is even more difficult for humans to infect other humans.
The most likely way the H5N1 strain of bird flu could mutate (evolve) would be by infecting a human who has the flu (normal flu that people get). It would then have the opportunity to exchange genes with a normal human flu virus. Armed with new genes it could then become a human-to-human infecting virus. If this happened a flu pandemic would strike, spreading around the world within a matter of a few months.
In 1918 there was a flu pandemic, it was called Spanish Flu. The virus evolved from bird flu. It spread around the world in less than a year and killed about 40 million people. Half of the fatalities were among young, healthy adults. The world population was much smaller then, people did not travel internationally or domestically as much as they do now.
Currently, the only prescription medication that is effective against bird flu is Tamiflu. It is an antiviral drug. It is not a vaccine. It is administered to a patient who has been infected with bird flu. You don’t take it to prevent bird flu infection. It only works if treatment is done during the early stages of the illness. Unfortunately, there are signs the virus may be developing resistance to this drug. All doctors can currently do if there is resistance is to increase the dose.
The World Health Organization says all countries and agencies must share data regarding outbreaks of bird flu among birds and humans. If we can respond rapidly anywhere in the world we may be able to slow down the spread of the H5N1 virus, which in turn means we will be buying ourselves some time. The longer it takes for the virus to mutate the more time we have to create and produce a vaccine (or some kind of effective medication). Even if we create an effective vaccine, as the American Health Secretary pointed out, we still need to be able to produce enough of it in time.
Written by: Christian Nordqvist
Editor: Medical News Today