A threat of different feather

If the ongoing threat of a terrorist attack, a record hurricane season and high motor fuel and heating prices weren't enough to worry about, there has now been a documented case of human-to-human transmission of bird flu in Thailand.

What does that mean to the average American? One scenario portends a bird flu pandemic is in the offing. The other suggests that the virus will not develop sufficient capacity to spread easily from one person to another.

The Bush administration isn't taking any chances. President Bush has asked Congress for $7.8 billion to prepare the nation for a global epidemic of influenza. Bush's initiative includes funding for vaccine development, drug and vaccine stockpiling, disease surveillance and local health department manpower needs. It also includes $18 million for manufacturing and trials of a human vaccine in Vietnam, which has suffered the most human deaths from the bird flu.

The Bush administration appears to view these global events with an appropriate degree of urgency. There need to be advances in vaccine-making technologies. For 50 years, flu vaccine has been manufactured the same, slow way, growing the vaccine in chicken eggs. Cell culture technology, in which vaccines are mass produced in large sealed vats, could potentially produce enough vaccine to inoculate every American within six months of the start of a pandemic. Pharmaceutical companies already use large sealed systems to manufacture vaccines against polio, rabies, chickenpox, shingles and hepatitis A.

Americans should understand that there is no bird flu vaccine at the present time and that avian flu has proven resistant to anti-viral treatments commonly used to treat influenza. Thus far, more than half of the 122 people who have contracted bird flu worldwide have died, according to the World Health Organization.

Researchers worry that the H5N1 viral strain is very similar to the avian flu strain that resulted in a global pandemic in 1918, killing at least 20 million people worldwide. The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have determined that there is considerable risk of a similar bird flu pandemic in the coming years. Another concern is that any vaccine made to combat known strains of bird flu virus may not be effective in the future if the virus mutates.

For the time being, the best defense against the spread of this disease and others is frequent handwashing. Should the virus emerge in the United States, experts also recommend self-imposed quarantines of the ill, stockpiling food and supplies as well as travel restrictions.

Meanwhile, there is a plentiful supply of regular influenza vaccine, which kills about 36,000 Americans a year. It would be prudent to obtain that vaccine in any event.

Until an effective and safe vaccine for bird flu can be developed and released to the public, low-tech defenses are the best bet in staving off cold, influenza and other communicable diseases. Best of all, they're cheap and readily available to the masses.