Bird flu plan 'a fantasy'

[Sally Furniss]

Bird flu plan 'a fantasy'

By CP

A worrisome cluster of human cases of H5N1 avian flu in a remote village in Indonesia is raising serious questions about the feasibility of an international plan to try to stop an emerging pandemic at the source.

Mathematical models have suggested containing a pandemic could be possible with a swift and sweeping response.

Based on those findings, experts at the World Health Organization have been working for months on a strategy to try to effect containment, if and when the need arises.

But the outbreak in Indonesia, where disease investigators have been met with fear and suspicion, illuminates the enormous challenges the pandemic SWAT team would face in trying to snuff out a nascent pandemic strain before it could spread from its place of origin to sweep the globe.

"This cluster in Indonesia is a test case for the pandemic," Maria Cheng, a WHO spokesman, said from Geneva. "It's basically testing our capacity to respond as quickly as possible, and how quickly we can detect it."

The Indonesian outbreak should serve as a reminder to all involved of the difficulties inherent in trying to translate the models' findings into reality, said infectious diseases expert Dr. Michael Osterholm.

"Our experiences with the virus during the last six months in Turkey, Iraq and now in Indonesia should give even the most ardent supporters of containment cause to realize why, while such an approach is an ideal, it also is a fantasy."

The models, by two international teams of scientists, suggested the WHO could contain an emerging pandemic if it discovered the virus was spreading among people within the first 20 human cases or within seven to 21 days of the start of transmission.

http://www.edmontonsun.com/News/World/2006/05/21/1590707-sun.html

 

[Mingus]

Bird flu plan 'a fantasy' -Dr Osterholm

Bird flu plan 'a fantasy' -Dr Osterholm

Machine Translation of
http://www.flutrackers.com/forum/showthread.php?p=13631#post13631

Saturdays May 20, 2006
The aviary cases of influenza in Indonesia raise concerns
Canadian Press

TORONTO
The recent appearance of virus H5N1 of the aviary influenza on the human ones in a village isolated from Indonesia throws serious doubts about the possibility that one can stop a pandemia with the source.
The mathematical models made it possible to believe that it would be possible to contain an epidemic with the source with an immediate reaction of the authorities of health. It is in base on these models that the experts of the World Health Organization developed their strategy of insulation of the virus, if ever this one evolved/moved to become transmissible the human ones with human.
But the cases indon?siens raise many questions. The investigators of WHO were confronted with a population in prey with the fear which did not trust them, a situation which could put in failure any hope to contain a serious blossoming.
"This blossoming of case in Indonesia is a standard case for a pandemia, Maria Cheng declared, a spokesman of WHO in Geneva. It makes it possible to test our capacity to recognize the appearance of the disease quickly and to answer it as soon as possible. It also shows us with what one can expect like collaboration in the affected population."
The cases indon?siens show that it will be necessary to align the mathematical models with reality, estimate for its part Dr. Michael Osterholm, expert in infectious diseases.
"Our experiments with the virus since six months in Turkey, in Iraq, and maintaining in Indonesia, should render comprehensible with the burning defenders of the theory of insulation than this one is a fantasy."
Dr. Osterholm never believed the mathematical models, developed since last year, showing that it would be possible to contain an aviary blossoming of influenza of human to human if all the favorable conditions were met.
"the mathematical models cannot predict the impact which the politicians will have, fear, the panic and lack of will to follow the payments put of before ensuring the public health ", affirm it.
According to these famous mathematical models, it would be possible to avoid a human pandemia if one could identify the virus before it does not reach a maximum of 20 people, and to treat it between seven and 21 days after the beginning of the blossoming.
In the case indon?sien, the blossoming was most important to date and touched seven members of a family, and others probably, in the village of Kubu Sembelang in the north of Sumatra. Six of the seven infected people died. Only six of the seven cases tested positive with virus H5N1. No sample could be taken for the first case, a 37 year old woman, died and buried at the beginning of May.
And at least another case appears suspect, that of the father of a 10 year old dead boy of the disease, what lets think of a transmission person to person. Despite everything, more than three weeks after the appearance of the disease, the investigators of WHO and other organizations could not yet establish if the man in question were infected or not virus H5N1. One still does not know either the origin of the infection nor until where it was propagated.

Meanwhile, the villagers are afraid and refuse for the majority to fully cooperate with the investigators.