Experts ponder the bird flu question while WHO tones down scare
Posted on : Sat, 01 Oct 2005 19:02:00 GMT | Author : Emma Price
After Dr. David Nabarro of the World Health Organisation put the probable toll of the next pandemic at 150 million at UN headquarters news conference, a flurry of media briefings have sought to assuage the alarm raised by countries fearing the crippling effect of the disease on their economies.
A WHO influenza spokesman even suggested, "We're not going to know how lethal the next pandemic is going to be until the pandemic begins", while health groups suggested that the flu's human strain could be identified within a few days of outbreak. WHO Australia's Influenza Collaboration Centre Director, Ian Gust, also went further to say that post-identification the vaccine would take only about a couple of months for production, while suggesting that some prototypes were being tested on humans.
Most health researchers agree with Gust that should the strain be a known one, it would be just two months before the vaccine's mass production would start. He put down vaccine production to “a matter of either hours of a couple of days”, and timed from when manufacturers are given seed virus “ it's only six or eight weeks before the first and new batches come out every few days thereafter”. Unlike the WHO suggested rapid pandemic that harm 150 million before being caught, Gust suggested the bird flu pandemic could have a slow start, giving medical workers time to produce the vaccine in sufficient quantities.
While the probability of another flu pandemic is definite, the inability to say when or how much it will affect humankind and whether the H5N1 strain could be the originator are posing a problem for researchers and health planners alike. But what they are keen to do is ensure that the world is prepared for the possibility as pandemics historically have infected 25 to 30 percent of the population with very severely handicapping effects on economies. Marc Lipsitch, Harvard School of Public Health Professor of Epidemiology told the ABC News, “We can't predict what a virus we've never seen will do”.
With the recent cases of human strains of bird flu, having appeared to solely have spread through the bird route rather than from human-to-human, researchers like Lipstitch say, “In order to become a pandemic, it will have to change…And we don't know what that changed strain will do”. While WHO itself is torn between saying 7.4 million will be affected the big 150 million figure, history indicates such large worldwide deaths are not totally out of the hat. But ever since the historical 1918, 1957 and 1968 pandemics, Medicine has significantly advanced making detection and vaccine production much faster than before. Given that most of the 65 people killed by the bird flu virus in Asia since 2003, contracted the disease from sick birds, there is hope that vaccine would produced quickly to counter the disease's spread. Already there are indications that countries in a bid to be prepared are already beginning to produce the vaccines, which should become more widely available sometime next year.
After Dr. David Nabarro of the World Health Organisation put the probable toll of the next pandemic at 150 million at UN headquarters news conference, a flurry of media briefings have sought to assuage the alarm raised by countries fearing the crippling effect of the disease on their economies.
A WHO influenza spokesman even suggested, "We're not going to know how lethal the next pandemic is going to be until the pandemic begins", while health groups suggested that the flu's human strain could be identified within a few days of outbreak. WHO Australia's Influenza Collaboration Centre Director, Ian Gust, also went further to say that post-identification the vaccine would take only about a couple of months for production, while suggesting that some prototypes were being tested on humans.
Most health researchers agree with Gust that should the strain be a known one, it would be just two months before the vaccine's mass production would start. He put down vaccine production to “a matter of either hours of a couple of days”, and timed from when manufacturers are given seed virus “ it's only six or eight weeks before the first and new batches come out every few days thereafter”. Unlike the WHO suggested rapid pandemic that harm 150 million before being caught, Gust suggested the bird flu pandemic could have a slow start, giving medical workers time to produce the vaccine in sufficient quantities.
While the probability of another flu pandemic is definite, the inability to say when or how much it will affect humankind and whether the H5N1 strain could be the originator are posing a problem for researchers and health planners alike. But what they are keen to do is ensure that the world is prepared for the possibility as pandemics historically have infected 25 to 30 percent of the population with very severely handicapping effects on economies. Marc Lipsitch, Harvard School of Public Health Professor of Epidemiology told the ABC News, “We can't predict what a virus we've never seen will do”.
With the recent cases of human strains of bird flu, having appeared to solely have spread through the bird route rather than from human-to-human, researchers like Lipstitch say, “In order to become a pandemic, it will have to change…And we don't know what that changed strain will do”. While WHO itself is torn between saying 7.4 million will be affected the big 150 million figure, history indicates such large worldwide deaths are not totally out of the hat. But ever since the historical 1918, 1957 and 1968 pandemics, Medicine has significantly advanced making detection and vaccine production much faster than before. Given that most of the 65 people killed by the bird flu virus in Asia since 2003, contracted the disease from sick birds, there is hope that vaccine would produced quickly to counter the disease's spread. Already there are indications that countries in a bid to be prepared are already beginning to produce the vaccines, which should become more widely available sometime next year.
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