Nations to Discuss Potential Flu Pandemic

Read the full article in the Washington Post.

"Amid growing concern that the world may be on a collision course with a deadly avian flu pandemic, health officials from about 80 countries are meeting in Washington today to map a collaborative strategy for minimizing the deaths and disruption an outbreak might wreak.

"The meeting, hosted by the State Department, marks the beginning of a major international trust-building project that U.S. officials said must be successful if scientists and public health officials are to have a fighting chance of quenching a nascent outbreak before it goes global.

"'Pandemics are diseases without borders and that's why we're focusing our attention on them,' said William R. Steiger, the Department of Health and Human Services' point person for international health, in an e-mail yesterday. 'We know that a threat against one nation is a threat against the world.'

"Today's meeting is part of a flurry of activity in the United States and abroad, all spurred by evidence that a strain of bird virus endemic in Southeast Asia is accumulating mutations that could ease its lethal spread from person to person......

"President Bush is scheduled to meet with drug company executives today to discuss strategies for developing new and speedier methods for making flu vaccine. Current techniques take many months to ramp up -- a time scale that is acceptable for the routine annual production of vaccines but that would be wholly inadequate if a rapidly spreading and especially deadly strain of avian flu were to erupt."


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