Playing chicken with avian flu- Government took years to rouse itself

[Coastie for Truth]

- Not the Midland-Odessa-Crawford Daily Planet or the Washington Times.

Playing Chicken With Avian Flu - Government took years to rouse itself to the danger that a killer pandemic could be headed to our shores - San Francisco Chronicle, Sunday, October 16, 2005


The good news is that God and Karl Rove have finally told President Bush to worry about avian flu. The bad news is that the White House's sudden willingness to spend billions on stockpiling antiviral medications and vaccines won't assure adequate supplies of either until 2007. By then, several million of us might already be dead.

At a news conference two weeks ago, the president expounded with his usual rambling ineloquence, "Wait a minute, this is an important subject. ... I am concerned about avian flu. I am concerned about what an avian flu outbreak could mean for the United States and the world. I am -- I have thought through the scenarios of what an avian flu outbreak could mean."

Better late than never? If many Katrina victims are still shocked that it took the presidential brain four days to fully focus on the carnage in New Orleans, consider that it has taken more than four years for the White House to react with any vigor to the almost apocalyptic threat of pandemic influenza.

Like Katrina, avian flu is a catastrophe with unprecedented advance warning. Since the first fatal leap from birds to humans in Hong Kong in 1997, leading researchers and public-health officials -- in a refrain that has grown only more desperate -- have urged Washington to commit resources to four priorities: first, sufficient foreign aid to buttress veterinary surveillance in outbreak centers like Vietnam and to help compensate peasant farmers for the destruction of their poultry.

Calls for --

1) sufficient foreign aid to buttress veterinary surveillance in outbreak centers

2) rapid stockpiling of enough Tamiflu (oseltamivir) -- the most effective and easily dispensed antiviral -- to protect at least one-quarter of the U.S. population.

3) crash program of vaccine development utilizing cell cultures rather than fertile chicken eggs to grow vaccines.

4) rebuilding local public-health infrastructure and hospital capacity as cornerstones of a national strategy to fight pandemics.

[mike_c]

1. kicked and nominated-- this is a MUST READ....

Very good article.

So until the Swiss send the Tamiflu, or Big Pharma decides it likes to make vaccines, we're all just po' folk, living below viral sea level in one big Ninth Ward.

[Metta]

2. Agree and how long have they been covering up about Mad Cow?

That's a crisis waiting to happen.

[EuroObserver]

3. Be sure they were awake enough to Buy Roche

a good while ago:

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?id=CH0012032113CHF4&domain=365

In any case, see here:

http://www.swx.com/market/shares/quotes/swiss/quote_chart_en.html

And pay attention to what the World Health Organisation has to say: http://www.who.int/en/

[Ladyhawk]

4. Has it roused itself???

Looks more like, "Terra! Use duct tape!" to me. They aren't preparing for anything.