Nations discuss bird flu threat

WASHINGTON – As delegations from around the globe discussed how to limit the threat of a bird flu pandemic, President Bush talked with drug company executives Friday about what it would take to speed up production of a vaccine.

Representatives from about 80 countries, meeting at the State Department, focused on prevention and containment of the virus. Meanwhile, at the White House, the president made it clear to the executives that he takes the threat of a pandemic seriously, Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt said.

“We talked about the need for our discussions to not just be about the short term but the long term,” Leavitt said of the White House meeting. “We talked about the need for us to be looking at pandemic influenzas as well as the annual flu, and ways to integrate our approach to those two public-health problems.”

Leavitt said the government’s goal is to increase capacity for annual flu vaccines to the point that companies could make a rapid transition to a pandemic flu vaccine if necessary.

Executives were concerned about greater protection from litigation. If healthy people suffer side effects from a vaccine, manufacturers can face huge lawsuits, Leavitt said.

He said the government would also have to assure vaccine manufacturers that they’ll have a market for the extra product that they make.

This month, vaccine maker Sanofi-Pasteur begins the first mass production of a new vaccine that promises to protect against bird flu, producing $100 million worth of inoculations for a government stockpile.

But it would take months to create a new vaccine from scratch if a different strain of bird flu from today’s emerges.

Even if the vaccine works, Sanofi is producing enough to protect anywhere from 2 million to 20 million people – depending on how much must be put into each dose – and it’s not clear when or where similar large stockpiles could be produced.

The bird flu so far has killed about 60 people in Asia, mostly poultry workers. Millions of birds have been slaughtered to try to prevent the spread of the virus.

Health officials are concerned about the possibility that the virus will mutate into a form that can be spread easily from person to person. Such a scenario would be catastrophic, because people have no natural immunity to it.

“In a world with international travel as prevalent as it is now, if there is a pandemic influenza anywhere, there is risk everywhere,” Leavitt said.