PANDEMIC BIRD FLU DEFENCES MAY PROVE TO BE PAPER WALL

LACK OF ANTI-VIRALS WOULD FAIL TO HALT SPREAD OF THE VIRUS ONCE A PANDEMIC BEGINS

From the Seattle Post-Intelligencer : "If pandemic influenza hits in the next year or so, the few weapons the United States has to keep it from spreading will do little, a new computer model shows.

"A pandemic flu is likely to strike one in three people if nothing is done, according to the results of computer simulation published in Thursday's journal Nature.

"If the government acts fast enough and has enough antiviral medicine to use as preventive dosings - which the United States does not - that could drop to about 28 percent of the population getting sick, the study found.

"Measures such as closing schools to halt breeding grounds and the use of the antiviral Tamiflu could reduce the disease's toll, Ferguson said. But efforts to stop flu from entering American borders - usually on planes with sick passengers - won't work, he said. At most, they can buy a couple of weeks of delay before the disease sets in, he said.

"If the United States were like Britain and had enough antiviral medicine for one quarter of the population to be used before people get sick, computer models show that the number of people getting sick would drop from about 102 million to about 84 million in America...

"Bill Hall, spokesman for Department of Health and Human Services, said his agency has 28 million courses of the antiviral (9.3 percent of the U.S. population), but acknowledged that on hand, there's only enough medicine for 5 million people (1.7 percent). The other 23 million courses are on order and should arrive by the end of the year. The plan is to have 81 million courses (27.1 percent) by 2008, he said.

"One course of treatment for people involves ten doses."

The recurring theme to a lot of these computer modelling related articles, published around the world in the past few weeks, with more to come, is that anti-virals will help about ten to thirty percent of the population, with the rest going without. The major problem then is that those who aren't dosed up get it and spread it further, therefore increasing the scope of the pandemic once it gets going.

Plus, the pandemics being modelled seem to be lasting eight to twelve weeks, per wave, and the ten percent average of a major country's population who has access to anti-virals will only have enough for for a week or two, not the entire length of each wave of pandemic flu, or avian influenza.

And anti-virals are not a vaccine, they are only expected to reduce the systems, and the growth of the virus, once you're infected. When you are infected, even though you are on anti-virals and not getting sicker, you still might be able to carry the virus in a form that you could pass on.