'A Tragic, Wasted Opportunity To Avert Disaster'
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A tragic, wasted opportunity to avert disaster
by Jo Revill, Health Editor,
The Observer, UK,
Sunday October 16, 2005.
It is easy to see why confusion surrounds public perceptions of the risk of bird flu. Commentators seem divided - it's either going to be a small outbreak in a distant country with tragic consequences for a few individuals, or it is going to be a catastrophe on a par with a world war. Amid all the confusion, an exhaustive amount of planning and preparation is being done behind the scenes in Whitehall to help Britain face a potential threat. But the public has not yet been put in the picture about what those plans are.
Much of the public discussion has been over the size of a stockpiling of the antiviral medication Tamiflu, and the threat from wild birds, rather than about how our society would cope over the likely four-month span of an epidemic.
There are some difficult questions to be resolved about anti-flu strategy, and the answers are not palatable. Which groups of people should be prioritised to receive Tamiflu? Does it make economic sense to give it to the middle-aged, rather than the elderly? Should vital IT workers be first in the queue?
But the real debate should be about vaccination - the only real long-term measure that will work for everyone. There is a terrible irony in the fact that the growth in scientific research and technology now means we can engineer a vaccine against a new strain within weeks, and yet it can't actually happen. There are only a handful of factories worldwide capable of manufacturing such a vaccine, and they cannot make more than 300 million doses in a year, compared with the several billion shots we would need.
As Dr Hitoshi Oshitani, an avian flu expert with the World Health Organisation, put it: 'We haven't prepared for a pandemic. You need huge resources to be able to respond, and I don't think any country is well prepared.'
For many years, scientists have warned that we need to build up our vaccine industry. The reason we haven't is because the regulatory authorities in the Western countries - overshadowed by the continual threat of legal action - make it impossible now to produce any vaccine which doesn't have a zero per cent risk attached to it.
This means that the final bill for bringing a vaccine to market is close to $1billion - at least four times more than it might cost a company to make a new anti-obesity drug. And guess which will make more profit?
· Jo Revill, Observer Health Editor, is writing a book about bird flu
(News items are posted under 'Fair Use' provisions)
See also:
'Is Tamiflu A Prescription For Survival?'
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