Seven new cases of the H5N1 — or Avian Flu — virus occurred over the past two weeks killing five, Mike Leavitt, Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, revealed Thursday.
Just because the Avian Flu no longer generates the media buzz it once did does not make the danger of an outbreak any less real, he added.
“We continue to take this threat seriously,” said Leavitt during a press conference at the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta where he was joined by Dr. Julie Gerberding, Director of the CDC, to announce new mitigation guidelines to fight potential pandemic outbreaks.
“Pandemic Influenza is not necessarily imminent but it is inevitable,” Gerberding warned and said that because of this, planning needed to continue across public and private sectors, as well as within families and communities.
As such, the CDC released community guidelines that do not involve medicines and vaccines. These so-called non-pharmaceutical interventions include recommendations on school closures, liberal work leave policies, the reduction of public gatherings and the voluntary quarantining of households where outbreaks occur.
Included with these guidelines is a new Pandemic severity index that borrows from those meteorologists use with hurricanes. For example, a Category 1 pandemic would be a nuisance while a Category 5 would be on the scale of the 1918 flu that killed millions worldwide.
Also included is the release of a new government Web site — www.PandemicFlu.gov — managed by the Department of Health and Human Services.
The nation’s goal is to slow down a pandemic’s spread, she added and, essentially, to buy time.
“We all know that if a pandemic virus occurs the first thing we would do is try to extinguish it but that might not be feasible,” Gerberding conceded, despite various government agencies working together to create what they describe as “early, targeted, layered measures.”
“We’re not likely to have an effective vaccine in the first six months of a pandemic,” she added, reflecting general consensus that US and world supplies of anti-viral medications such as Tamiflu are in short supply.
“This is going to be really hard work,” said Dr. Martin Cetron, Director for the Division of Global Migration and Quarantine at the CDC, about creating tools and strategies to maximize the number of lives saved during a pandemic.
“One thing that would be much harder would be to come up with a solution on the fly in the midst of a pandemic. That would be really hard and almost insufferable.”
The podcast above is a recording of the Center for Disease Control Press Conference on Pandemic Flu Preparedness.
Download the Report: Interim Pre-pandemic Planning Guidance: Community Strategy for Pandemic Influenza Mitigation in the United States – Early Targeted Layered use of Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions, February 1, 2007 (108 pages, PDF).
