Bush cites U.S. plans against bird flu risk
Wednesday, October 5, 2005
Printable FormatBy Brian Knowlton
International Herald Tribune
WASHINGTON - President George W. Bush said Tuesday that he was working to prepare the United States for a possible deadly outbreak of avian flu.
If an epidemic appears, he said, he has weighed whether to quarantine parts of the country and whether to employ the military to enforce such a quarantine. "I am concerned about what an avian flu outbreak could mean for the United States and the world," he said.
Speaking at a White House news conference, Bush made clear that he was not predicting such an outbreak.
"I'm just suggesting to you that we better be thinking about it, and we are," he said of avian flu. "We're trying to put plans in place." A bipartisan group of senators have been pressing Bush to prepare for a bird-flu emergency. His sense of urgency appeared to have been heightened, as well, by the widespread criticism of the response to the two hurricanes that battered the Gulf Coast.
Since 2003, the avian flu has killed about 65 people in Southeast Asia who had been in contact with infected fowl. The virus has not thus far mutated into a strain capable of transmission from one human to another. If it did, scientists say, it could kill millions of people worldwide, like the 1918-19 Spanish flu pandemic, which claimed more lives than World War I. Because the virus is new, humans have little defense against it. It kills about half of those infected.
But Bush, in devoting a long and detailed reply to the subject of bird flu, appeared intent on promoting readiness and raising the public's awareness, as well as demonstrating his own. He referred to the "H5N1 virus," said he had read a book on the 1918 pandemic and had been briefed by Dr. Anthony Fauci, who heads the infectious disease division of the National Institutes of Health.
An outbreak would pose difficult policy challenges, Bush said, including the question of imposing a regional quarantine. "It's one thing to shut down your airplanes, it's another thing to prevent people from coming in to get exposed to the avian flu," he said. Doing so, Bush said, might require using "a military that's able to plan and move."
The president had already raised, following Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, the delicate question of giving the military a larger role in responding to domestic disasters. His comment Tuesday appeared to presage a concerted push to change laws that limit such use.
Congressional attention to avian flu has recently risen sharply. The Senate last week voted to provide $3.9 billion in emergency funds to plan for and react to a bird flu outbreak. The House has not taken corresponding action.
Robert Gibbs, a spokesman for Senator Barack Obama, Democrat of Illinois, said the vote and Bush's comment reflected "some agreement that the United States is behind in getting prepared for avian flu and that the time to try to make that gap up is now." More than 30 Democratic senators, including Obama, sent Bush a letter Tuesday asking him to release the administration's final plan for dealing with a pandemic influenza. The group expressed its "grave concern that the nation is dangerously unprepared."
At the United Nations last month, Bush proposed an "international partnership" to combat the disease. He said Tuesday that he had spoken "privately to as many leaders as I could find" about raising awareness and ensuring maximum efforts to quickly report any instances of the disease to the World Health Organization. WHO and the European Union have been urging countries for months to prepare for a possible pandemic.
The president said he had spoken to Fauci about development of a vaccine, but added that "we're just not that far down the manufacturing process."
When the former U.S. secretary of health and human services, Tommy Thompson, resigned in December, he was asked what health threat worried him most. He cited the avian flu. "This is a really huge bomb," he said, "that could adversely impact on the health care of the world," killing tens of millions.