Experts: world leaders ignoring deadly flu threat

<body leftmargin="0" bgcolor="#000060" text="#FFFFFF" link="#FFFF00" vlink="#FF9900"> <p class="MsoNormal"><b><font face="Arial" size="5">Experts: world leaders ignoring deadly flu threat</font></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><font size="1" face="Arial">May 26, 2005<br> Special to World Science</font> </p> <p class="MsoNormal"><b><font face="Arial" size="2">A virulent strain of avian influenza from southeast Asia will probably cause the next worldwide flu outbreak, and world leaders are ignoring repeated warnings about the threat, experts say.<br> <br> The consequences could be devastating, experts reported in a special section of this week’s issue of the research journal Nature. The section details “the risks we face and how badly prepared we are to deal with it,” an announcement from the journal said.<br> <br> “Unless the international community now moves decisively to mitigate this pandemic threat, we will in all probability pay heavily within a few years,” an editorial in the journal read. “Then, hard questions will be asked as to why we were not prepared.”<br> <br> The flu could strike one fifth of the world’s population, requiring 30 million people to be hospitalized and killing one quarter of those, researchers said—and that’s an optimistic estimate. So wrote Albert Osterhaus of Erasmus Medical Centre, Rotterdam, Netherlands, and colleagues in the journal.<br> <br> The H5N1 strain of avian flu most often affects chickens and other birds in Asia, but has begun spreading to humans. It has reportedly killed 37 people in Vietnam, 12 in Thailand and four in Cambodia. Chinese officials said this week they had found more than 500 dead wild geese and other birds in a nature reserve in the western province of Qinghai. <br> <br> Osterhaus and his colleagues called in their article for a permanent global task force for influenza, rather than relying solely on the ad-hoc teams created during virus outbreaks. But this issue is not only about death and disease, wrote the University of Minnesota’s Michael T. Osterholm in a related article. <br> <br> “The world is heading towards a global economic disaster unlike anything we’ve seen during other public health crises,” the journal explained in its announcement. “The world economy is not threatened by diseases such as HIV, malaria or tuberculosis, despite their devastating effect on local communities. The global panic created by flu will be different.”<br> <br> Osterholm called for bold leadership by the leaders of major industralized nations and action at all levels: “We must demand nothing less than an international effort to develop a new type of influenza vaccine that can be manufactured on a much shorter timescale.”<br> <br> Scientists writing in the journal also called but for vaccines for poultry, where there is still a chance we may be able to control the spread of the disease and so buy ourselves some time.Like Osterhaus, they argued for much greater cooperation between public health agencies and global agricultural authorities. <br> <br> The commentaries “are by experts in various fields,” and “they all agree that time is running out for the international community to take action that will limit the devastation of a pandemic,” an epidemic of world proportions, the announcement said.<br> <br> There are serious questions about how well the world is prepared in terms of its capacity to produce a vaccine against the pandemic and global stockpiles of antiviral drugs, researchers argued.</font></b> </p> </body>