Seeing The Bird Flu  

With Matt off the air I haven't been paying a great deal of attention to events in the bird flu world (though I see the odd headline passing by from Effect Measure in FTD's excellent new portal design) - however Dave Johnson at Seeing The Forest has a few interesting snippets up that caught my eye.

First on UK preparations:

The new U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt told the Associated Press in early August that an influenza pandemic was now an "absolute certainty," echoing repeated warnings from the World Health Organization that it was "inevitable." Likewise Science magazine observed that expert opinion held the odds of a global outbreak as "100 percent."

In the same grim spirit, the British press revealed that officials were scouring the country for suitable sites for mass mortuaries, based on official fears that avian flu could kill as many as 700,000 Britons. The Blair government is already conducting emergency simulations of a pandemic outbreak ("Operation Arctic Sea") and is reported to have readied "Cobra" -- a cabinet-level working group that coordinates government responses to national emergencies like the recent London bombings from a secret war room in Whitehall -- to deal with an avian flu crisis.

Little of this Churchillian resolve is apparent in Washington. Although a sense of extreme urgency is evident in the National Institutes of Health where the czar for pandemic planning, Dr. Anthony Fauci, warns of "the mother of all emerging infections," the White House has seemed even less perturbed by migrating plagues than by wanton carnage in Iraq.

Substantial chance of worldwide spread. Worse for developing world than developed world, for multiple reasons. Don't know when a form that is readily transmitted between humans will evolve, but this H5N1 virus has shown that it is capable of that on a limited basis. We also don't know whether a human-to-human form will have as high a mortality rate. US woefully unprepared, due to years of underfunding our public health infrastructure. Pharma industry not able to pick up the ball in terms of rapid development and mass production of vaccine. US & other govts should subsidize vaccine development, because market incentives are inadequate and liability incentives discourage private industry from this field.