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Officials Question Bird Flu Preparations
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WASHINGTON (AP) -- State health officials are questioning how the nation would deal with the huge demand for a vaccine during a flu pandemic when it already has trouble vaccinating the public against the regular flu. The administration invited state and homeland security officials to Washington on Monday to get their feedback on pandemic planning, and to announce that it would visit every state in the country over the next 120 days to reinforce the work. The state officials noted that demand for a vaccine during a pandemic would soar far beyond what the nation experiences each winter with regular flu, yet throughout the country, doctors report an inability to get their hands on the vaccine. "We are not credible year after year when we cannot get our priority populations vaccinated," said Leigh Devlin, president of the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials. Janet Olszewski, director of the Michigan Department of Community Health, said her state recently obtained 36,000 doses of flu vaccine, but had orders from doctors for 90,000. "This is getting pretty frustrating for us quite honestly," Olszewski told a panel of the nation's top health officials. |
Last week, the CDC said this year's supply of flu vaccine will reach 80 million doses by December - a robust supply considering the United States has never administered more than 83 million doses in a single year. But one manufacturer, Chiron Corp. will produce less than anticipated, plus it was about a month late with some shipments. Spot shortages of the vaccine have since been reported in many states. Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt said the key to the administration's pandemic preparation was revitalizing the flu vaccine industry in the United States. By producing massive quantities of a vaccine, federal officials said they hoped distribution problems could be muted. The administration is working under the assumption that as many as 90 million Americans would become sick during a global flu pandemic. A moderate pandemic would kill about 209,000. A severe one, such as the one that occurred in 1918, would kill about 1.9 million people. Fears of a pandemic have increased in recent months as a virus infecting millions of birds has spread throughout Asia. While the virus has not yet spread from person to person, officials fear that it could eventually mutate and become as contagious as the annual flu. |
Human-to-human transmission of the virus would be particularly deadly because humans have no immunity to the virus. So far, the virus has killed about 50 percent of the 120 people who have contracted it as a result of close contact with poultry. Leavitt said a large portion of the president's $7.1 billion flu pandemic plan goes toward revitalizing the entire flu vaccine industry. "We must be able to create as much as 300 million courses of vaccine in a short period," Leavitt said. "We don't have that capacity today. We don't have it domestically at all. We have some capacity, but in a pandemic, vaccine needs to be produced here, not in another country." He said the United States needs to increase demand for the annual flu vaccine. That way, drug manufacturers would be more willing to invest in flu vaccine production. Overall, state officials applauded the Bush administration's effort to include them in planning efforts and to take pandemic preparations on the road. Leavitt said the "state summits" would drive home to local politicians the importance of the issue.
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