Study: U.S. couldn’t slow flu pandemic

04/26/2006

U.S. lags behind Europe in preparedness, researchers say

Wednesday, April 26, 2006; Posted: 8:14 p.m. EDT (00:14 GMT)

WASHINGTON (AP)—A mostly unprepared United States could do little to slow pandemic flu if it hits anytime soon, according to a new computer model.

And Britain is only a bit better off, the same study suggests.

If the U.S. government does nothing, a deadly global flu outbreak is likely to strike a third of the population, according to the results of a computer simulation published in Thursday’s journal Nature.

If government acts fast enough and has enough antiviral medicine to use as a preventive—and the United States doesn’t right now—the number could drop to about 28 percent of the population, the study found.

“Both cases we came up with were very pessimistic,” said lead author Neil Ferguson of the Department of Infectious Disease Epidemiology at Imperial College in London. “There is no single magic bullet for stopping pandemic flu.”

So far this year H5N1 bird flu—which doesn’t move easily from person to person—has infected 204 people and killed 113, according to the World Health Organization. Most of the human cases and deaths have been in Asia, but birds with the disease have hit Europe.

Combining use of the antiviral Tamiflu with school closings could reduce the disease’s toll a bit, Ferguson said. But efforts to stop flu from entering U.S. borders—usually on planes with sick passengers—won’t work, he said. At most, such efforts can buy a couple of weeks’ delay before the disease sets in, he said.

Ferguson’s computer simulation is the second released this month and is more pessimistic than an earlier study led by Timothy Germann, a Los Alamos National Laboratory scientist. He said the flu could be less infectious and that efforts could slow it a bit.

Even Germann, who said no one knows which study is closer to reality, isn’t that optimistic.

“It would have to be a very weak pandemic strain for us to be able to stop it right now,” he said in an interview this week. “Most likely we wouldn’t be completely prepared.”

If the United States were like Britain and had enough preventive drugs for one-quarter of the population, computer models show that the number of people getting sick would drop from about 102 million to about 84 million in America, Ferguson said.

However, right now the United States has only enough medicine on hand for about 5 million people, or about 1.7 percent of the population, according to the Department of Health and Human Services.

HHS Spokesman Bill Hall said the agency has ordered enough drugs for another 23 million people, and those should arrive by the end of the year. The plan is to have enough medicine for about a quarter of the population by 2008.

“Twenty-five percent doesn’t go very far, and we don’t have anywhere near that,” said study co-author Donald Burke, professor of international health and epidemiology at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Public Health. “If it does occur before we have enough drug and enough vaccine, then the epidemic will have a substantial impact.”

If a country gets enough Tamiflu for half its population, it could then act aggressively in dosing families of flu-struck patients, and that could cut the flu attack rate by 75 percent, Ferguson said. So instead of 102 million infected Americans, it would be 33 million.

“France could do this now; this is highlighting the gap between U.S. and Europe,” Ferguson said.