Drugs no answer to birdflu

Many governments around the world are stockpiling antiviral drugs and some companies are trying to speed up vaccine production but these measure give a false sense of security and will do little to counter a flu pandemic, an expert cautioned on Monday.

Michael Osterholm, an infectious disease expert who has been studying the risk of pandemic flu for decades and is a U.S. government adviser, said governments should be preparing to cope with the pandemic instead of relying entirely on the hope of using vaccines and drugs to control it.

If the H5N1 Avian flu begins to easily infect humans, it will move too quickly for drugs and vaccines to be of much use, Osterholm said.

"It doesn't matter if we have a vaccine now or not. We can't make it," Osterholm said in a telephone interview.

The H5N1 bird flu virus has killed at least 65 people in four Asian nations since late 2003, and has killed or forced the destruction of tens of millions of poultry.

Experts say it is mutating steadily and fear it will eventually acquire the changes it needs to spread easily from person to person.

If it does, it will sweep around the world in months or even weeks and could kill millions of people - as many as 150 million, according to the most dire forecast by the World Health Organization.

Avian influenza (also known as bird flu) is a type of influenza virulent in birds. It was first identified in Italy in the early 1900s and is now known to exist worldwide.

Infection

The causative agent is the avian influenza (AI) virus. AI viruses all belong to the influenza virus A genus of the Orthomyxoviridae family and are negative-stranded, segmented RNA viruses.

When avian flu infects people it looks like any other flu with respiratory symptoms, fever and other common effects but it will kill many more than the 500,0000 people who die of ordinary flu each year around the world.

People have known about the risk of an influenza pandemic for a very long time, said Osterholm, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Minnesota who advises the federal government on such issues.

"We have had a pandemic flu plan as a planning process since 1976," said Osterholm. "Nobody has completed it. It's been one of the most long-standing incompleted processes in Washington. Nobody wants to believe that modern medical science can't handle something."

But it cannot, said Osterholm, who has seen the current U.S. flu plan. The plan has not been published yet but leaked versions suggest the country has done little to prepare for an H5N1 pandemic.

Osterholm and other experts have long been complaining that there are not sufficient hospital beds, equipment or trained workers to cope with a major epidemic.