Bird Flu Blues

Last week, we learned that deadly avian flu has spread from Asia to Europe, poised to become the next human influenza pandemic--perhaps even more deadly than the 1918 flu, which killed 20-50 million people worldwide.

Leaks from a U.S. government report revealed that our country is utterly unprepared for such a calamity. And a new scientific study proved that the 1918 flu jumped directly to humans from birds--as might today's encroaching avian flu strain, known as H5N1.

In other words, of all the natural and manmade disasters that have plagued humankind in the past year, something worse may be just around the corner: a global epidemic of lethal influenza long feared by public health experts and infectious diseases specialists.

If that happens, the Bush team will be on the line as never before. If the administration handles this challenge correctly, it could lead the world in preventing unnecessary deaths and actually saving lives. If it fails, millions here and abroad could perish; the wrenching accounts from the 9/11 Commission could pale before the heartbreaking tales from the Pandemic Influenza Commission.

Today, according to the World Health Organization, a flu pandemic could kill 150 million worldwide--including, in a worst case scenario, 2 million Americans. Simply put, such an outbreak is today's number one worry among public health officials, especially because the H5N1 bird flu strain is extraordinarily virulent, both in birds and mammals. Human flu pandemics, sown in nature by viruses found in migrating aquatic birds, cannot be prevented. Over the past century, they have occurred about every 30 years. The last one took place in 1968--which means we're overdue for the next. No matter where on earth a pandemic takes root, high speed transportation would guarantee its transcontinental spread within weeks. High speed communications would guarantee global panic within hours. Whatever the course of today's H5N1, flu pandemics are inevitable.

To understand how federal officials could best handle this impending disaster, I consulted Dr. David Fedson. Fedson, an American, is former director of medical affairs for the French pharmaceutical company Aventis Pasteur MSD (now Sanofi Pasteur). Since retiring from his corporate post in 2002, he has been the most persistent and articulate gadfly of government and industry on their failure to prepare for the next monster wave of flu. Both as a scientist and a scholar, he has thought more deeply and written more prolifically than anyone else on the topic.

Earlier this year, in an interview about pandemic flu for the journal , he had told me: "We have a toxic mixture in America of a corporate culture that is inappropriate for producing vaccines for national security, and a political culture that is unwilling to accept government responsibility for ensuring it is achieved."

American leaders, Fedson explained to me, should learn from the lessons of history, back the best science with meaningful money, and at last adopt an attitude of collective responsibility for the planet.

Specifically, that means:

• Washington must offer financial incentives to American drug companies, so they wouldn't go broke making an emergency vaccine. • In case of a pandemic, drug companies must agree to suspend patent rights. • The federal government must accept all liability costs for pandemic vaccines. • The Bush administration must lead an international campaign to prepare for, and defend against, the next flu pandemic.

Let's look at these one by one. First, our country must be able to produce pandemic flu vaccines in a hurry. That requires immediate public funding for clinical trials of the most promising vaccine candidates. But right now, no American-owned pharmaceutical company produces pandemic flu vaccine.

Indeed, over the last decade or so, many American drug firms got out of the vaccine business altogether, because these commodity medicines are expensive to develop, cheaply sold and fraught with the risks of harming previously healthy people. If no American drug company can churn out a pandemic vaccine, we'll be left high and dry when the next globe-girdling outbreak begins. Other vaccine-producing countries will want to inoculate their populations, and will horde their pharmaceutical cache. We won't get any.