Word: influenza
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...governments that have put in place pandemic response plans has risen from 20 percent to 60 percent. "We've reached a greater consensus and clarity on what has to be done to control the spread of the H5N1 virus," Dr. David Nabarro, United Nations Coordinator for Avian and Human Influenza told TIME. "If we continue to make inroads, we'll end up with a smaller and less virulent pandemic that we expected...
...billion over three years. A conference on financing that operation will be held in Beijing next January. The Geneva gathering hammered out a plan to combat the virus by culling infected poultry, strengthening early warning systems and pandemic preparedness, and building up regional stockpiles of anti-viral drugs and influenza vaccines. The WHO already has a stockpile of three million doses of Tamiflu that can be quickly deployed, while the drug's manufacturer, Roche, this week announced plans to increase production to 300 million treatments...
...while the TV cameras rolled, U.S. President Gerald Ford pushed up his sleeve and received his influenza vaccine. It wasn't an ordinary flu jab. In February of that year, an 18-year-old U.S. Army recruit had died of a swine flu virus, which scientists at the time believed was closely related to the virus that had caused the 1918 influenza pandemic. High-level disease experts worried that the new virus signaled the return of the 1918 flu, and barely a month after the soldier's death, Ford announced an unprecedented emergency plan to inoculate the entire American population...
...based on the best available science at the time. (We know now that the 1918 flu was an avian virus, not a swine one.) While the 1976 program was an expensive and embarrassing mistake, it also underscored just how difficult it is to decide how to prepare for an influenza pandemic, whose schedule and severity we have virtually no way of predicting. "No one really knows what's going to happen," says Dr. Howard Markel, a medical historian at the University of Michigan and the author of When Germs Travel. "Anyone who says they do is an idiot or lying...
...less developed countries are very vulnerable to the avian-influenza pandemic that is expected to spread around the world [Oct. 17]. Those countries lack the means to fight the flu. There are millions of chickens in small areas like the island of Java in Indonesia. Should the flocks become infected and the bird-flu virus mutate and spread to human beings, it would put Indonesia's 220 million people at risk...