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2005 sees pandemic threat explode on public radar; planning traction ensues

TORONTO (CP) - Though she'd been steeped in pandemic flu response scenarios for the last quarter century, Dr. Susan Tamblyn was taken aback when U.S. President George W. Bush touched off a tidal wave of concern in late September over the threat of a flu pandemic.

For years, a too-small cadre of public health stalwarts like Tamblyn had been working diligently to devise plans aimed at helping countries, provinces, cities or towns weather an inevitable but unpredictable flu pandemic that can be expected to cause illness, death and social disruption.

And since the H5N1 avian flu virus started rampaging across Southeast Asia in late 2003, worried public health officials and infectious disease experts had been doing their best to raise the alarm. The inevitable might well be unfolding in the dying poultry flocks, they warned.

The world seemed unimpressed. That is until a vicious tempest named Katrina taught a humbled American administration how little it could do to mitigate the crushing impact of Mother Nature's wrath.

Suddenly the experts' warning - there's no greater potential natural disaster than a bad flu pandemic - began to resonate with frightening clarity.

And just about then, migratory birds began to die on the fringes of Europe, stricken by the same virus that had sickened nearly 120 people in four Asian countries, killing roughly half those who fell ill. A month later, the world's most populous country, China, admitted it had joined the list of nations - now numbering five - with confirmed human cases of H5N1 infection.


UN Secretary General Kofi Annan appointed a pandemic czar, Dr. David Nabarro, to co-ordinate preparedness efforts across the United Nations' vast network. Bush convened an emergency meeting of vaccine and antiviral drug makers at the White House. Canada's health minister, Ujjal Dosanjh, gathered counterparts from about 30 developed and developing countries to plot strategy.


Priorities for 2006 including drawing the public into discussions about who will have first access to antiviral drugs and later vaccine. Urging the business community to prepare contingency plans. Diversifying the cache of antiviral drugs to add Relenza to the stores of Tamiflu.

http://www.brandonsun.com/story.php?story_id=14494