The United States is preparing for a worst-case scenario if bird flu causes a human pandemic, with a projected 92 million people sick, schools closed and businesses disrupted, Health and Human Services Secretary Michael Leavitt said Monday.
Leavitt said he was scheduling 50 separate state-by-state meetings with state and local officials to begin pinning down how each community will plan for the possible pandemic of H5N1 avian influenza.
“The reality is, and you know it -- pandemics happen,” Leavitt told a meeting in Washington of state and local health and emergency officials.
“When it comes to a pandemic, we are overdue and we are underprepared.”
The H5N1 avian flu virus has infected 130 people in five Asian countries and killed 69 of them. But it is spreading steadily among poultry flocks from China to Ukraine, and experts fully expect it will affect birds all around the world.
The U.S. plan includes a worst-case scenario with an outbreak starting in a small village in Thailand and spreading quickly to Europe and the United States.
“At the end of week six you will see pandemic cases (in the United States) that will be 722,000,” Leavitt said. Within 16 weeks of the theoretical Thai outbreak, 92 million Americans would have been infected with H5N1 flu.
The virus now has a known 50 percent mortality rate, but no one knows how it will mutate and how that will affect its ability to be transmitted, to cause disease and to kill.
It remains difficult for humans to catch -- for now.
“What we don’t have, and what we hope we never have, is sustained human to human transmission like we do with seasonal influenza,” Dr. Julie Gerberding, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told the meeting.
Meetings within four months
But federal health officials said it was urgent for local communities to get prepared, and now.
“Emergency planning does not go well when undertaken in the middle of a disaster itself,” Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff told the meeting, citing lessons learned from Hurricane Katrina, which devastated Gulf of Mexico states in August and September.
“The earlier you begin to plan, the better off you are.”
Leavitt said governors were being asked to convene meetings within 120 days.
“We believe there is a great advantage if all of us are using the same pandemic planning assumptions,” Leavitt said.
Chertoff said a pandemic would affect “the entire fabric of our society” People will stay home from work and school, impacting supplies of food and possibly even water, electricity and fuel.
“We live in a world of just-in-time supply chains,” Chertoff said. That could mean shortages.
The HHS plan calls for schools to close for weeks at a stretch. “Closing schools has a profound consequence,” Leavitt said. “Movement restrictions of any sort, whether on the borders of our country or borders of our towns creates very real economic dilemmas,” he added.
There will be “agonizingly difficult choices about the distribution of food and resources”, Leavitt said.
But Dr. Rajeev Venkayya, senior director for biodefense on the White House Homeland Security council, said getting businesses and communities to plan now could reduce the impact.
“There are a series of concrete steps that institutions can take,” Venkayya told the meeting. “Teaching good infection control measures now pays dividends tomorrow.”
He said businesses were being asked to come up with plans now to keep minimal services running.
“The truth is that a pandemic influenza of some sort will ultimately be our lot to handle,” Venkayya said.
“We can become the very first society in the history of man to be prepared to do something about it.”
