With all the attention surrounding the bird flu, and the efforts the president has made to boost a vaccine production here and drug stockpiles, are we missing the boat on the most important way to prevent this disease from hitting us hard?
With all the attention surrounding the bird flu, and the efforts the President has made to boost a vaccine production here and drug stockpiles, are we missing the boat on the most important way to prevent this disease from hitting us hard? Some experts say we are. There’s all the talk about the flu drugs and how can we make a vaccine more efficiently--both important topics.
But the common sense approach would put the emphasis on going, as the experts say, upstream--to where the problem has started and is existing….and that means the focus should be, at least more intensively, not on humans, but rather, on the birds.
Dr. Irwin Redliner, Associate Dean of the Mailman School of Public Health, New York, says, "What’s the visual for you on CNN or ABC or CNBC, it’s a flock of birds, it’s people handling chickens in a marketplace, it’s tough but it’s at our own peril as a global community that we don’t pay attention to this message of upstream intervention."
Going upstream--to the source of the bird flu: the birds! Dr. William Karesh, Director of the Field Veterinary Program of the Wildlife Conservation Society, says, "All the evidence points to it came out of wild birds at some point but it wasn’t very deadly. It evolved to be very deadly in chickens." And that’s where it is still.
But with the push now to create a better health system here in the U.S., one with more flu drugs, with more vaccines and a quicker way to create vaccines, a stockpile of medical supplies and equipment. Perhaps, the easiest and clearly most direct route to controlling this problem before it ever gets out of hand, is to instead, nip it in the bud--which is--the bird.
David Heymann, Executive Director of Communicable Disease of the World Health Organization, says, "If we can contain that virus in Asia, and stop it from it’s course on to becoming a pandemic virus, there will be no problem in North America. The world has to work together on these issues." Here’s the big problem: chicken handlers in Asia are not reimbursed if their flock is found infected with bird flu--so they’re not so easy to give up the birds. "We kill all their chickens and they don’t get paid and that has to stop," says Dr. Karesh.
There is an easy answer. "The best estimates are by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, to control the disease in poultry they’re estimated 140 million dollars and they were saying that two years ago. And they still don’t have that support. This disease could be controlled with proper funding and it’s not much money," says Dr. Karesh. So, the solution for this concern, if it did happen, may be within our grasp-- by simply focusing on stopping the bird flu virus in it’s tracks--and keeping it grounded--in the birds.