November 1, 2005

 

Vaccine focus expected as Bush to unveil flu strategy Tuesday

 

 

Vaccine improvement was expected to take center stage in the Bush administration's preparations for a worldwide flu outbreak, with a potential travel ban and restrictions on global commerce part of the contingency planning.

 

US President George W. Bush on Tuesday would announce his strategy on how to prepare for the next flu pandemic - preparations expected to cost at least US$6.5 billion - whether it was caused by the worrisome Asian bird flu or some other super-strain of influenza.

 

A key element: States and cities would get their first specific instructions from federal health officials on such things as who should get limited doses of vaccines, and the antiviral medications Tamiflu or Relenza.

 

Topping that list were workers involved in manufacturing flu vaccines, health workers caring for the ill, and other first responders such as police and ambulance drivers, said a public health specialist shown a recent version of the plan.

 

More details are to be released a day after Bush's speech at the National Institutes of Health. The president would first stress that it would take more than the federal government to battle a super-flu.

 

"It's akin to the Rosie-the-riveter type thing, because we are asking every American and every American institution to do quite a bit," said White House spokesman Trent Duffy.

 

"America has this tough-it-out strategy when you get sick. You aren't helping yourself or the country going to work when you get ill. You are potentially threatening a greater health issue if you send children to school when they are sick," Duffy said.

 

Pandemics strike when the easy-to-mutate influenza virus shifts to a strain that people have never experienced before, something that has happened three times in the previous century. While it was impossible to say when the next super-flu would strike, concern was growing that the bird flu strain known as H5N1 could trigger one, if it mutated to start spreading easily among people. Since 2003, at least 62 people in Southeast Asia have died from H5N1; most regularly handled poultry.

 

The nation's strategy would start with attempting to spot an outbreak abroad early, and working to contain it before it reached the US.

 

International cooperation "represents a best hope of stopping the lightning spread of a pandemic," Duffy said.

 

There was a possibility that a pandemic would force restrictions of international travel and commerce, he said.

 

That was one reason, Duffy said, that "the president recognises, and we all recognise, that we need to manufacture the vaccine here in America."

 

Today, most of the world's vaccines against regular winter flu, including much of that used by Americans each flu season, are manufactured in factories in Europe.

 

The government has already ordered US$162.5 million worth of vaccine to be made and stockpiled against the Asian bird flu, more than half to be made in a US factory.

 

But the administration plan called for more than stockpiling vaccines. It would stress a new method of manufacturing flu vaccines - growing the virus to make them in easy-to-handle cell cultures, instead of the current cumbersome process that used millions of chicken eggs. There would also be incentives for new US-based vaccine factories to open.

 

Such steps would take several years to implement, but the hope was that eventually they could allow production of enough vaccines to go around within six months of a pandemic's start.

 

"The notion is that prevention beats therapy," said Dr. William Schaffner of Vanderbilt University, an influenza specialist who advised the government on vaccination and has received some information about the plan.

 

Antiviral drugs such as Tamiflu, however, were expected to provide both treatment and some protection against catching a super-flu until vaccines could be distributed. Last-minute discussions included how much Tamiflu to stockpile, with one possibility that the federal government would stockpile enough for 44 million people, and telling states to collectively purchase another 31 million treatment courses.

 

Hoping to spur the long-awaited pandemic plan, the Senate last week passed US$8 billion in emergency funding for Bush to spend on the preparations.