Barack Obama

Obama leads Democrats in efforts on bird flu

Saturday, November 5, 2005

ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
By Ben Roberts
Post-Dispatch Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON - Decades before bird flu outbreaks in Asia triggered worldwide fears of a deadly pandemic, Illinois Sen. Barack Obama saw firsthand how interactions between people and livestock can effect public health.

Growing up in Jakarta, Indonesia, Obama recalls, poultry was raised literally "in folks' backyards." The images still live in his mind amid concern about the disease mutating and spreading among humans.

So when the first-term Democratic senator arrived in Washington in January, he made it a top priority to help prepare the country for the possibility that the avian flu could become a public health crisis.

"When you've spent time in any third world country, particularly Asia, you're familiar with how closely people live with livestock," he said in an interview. "And there are all kinds of infectious diseases like malaria, pox, diphtheria. It spreads because people don't have the type of separation between humans and livestock we have in advanced countries."

The avian flu has already killed four people in Indonesia, where Obama spent five years of his childhood. More than 60 people across Asia have died of the disease.

The avian flu has not yet mutated to the level of human-to-human transmission that could cause it to become a pandemic. But some officials say it is only a matter of time before a global flu outbreak occurs.

Critic of Bush plan

The World Health Organization predicts that, once a fully contagious virus emerges, it could spread around the globe in less than three months and kill 2 million to 7 million people.

When President George W. Bush unveiled a plan last week to prepare for an outbreak in the United States, Obama, who has been at the forefront of the issue for several months, became the leader for Democrats offering alternatives.

In April, Obama introduced the first free-standing legislation in Congress related to the avian flu with several bipartisan co-sponsors.

Since then, he has remained vocal on the issue, fighting to secure appropriations to assist international surveillance of the avian flu, and making speeches on the Senate floor in an attempt to raise awareness of the disease.

Bush's proposal would set aside $7.1 billion for vaccine development, the stockpiling of vaccines and antiviral drugs, international surveillance of the disease and meeting the needs of local health departments to deal with a possible outbreak. The largest chunk of that, almost $3 billion, would go toward speeding up the development process of a vaccine.

But shortly after the president's announcement, Obama led a group of senators, among them Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., and Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., in a news conference to criticize Bush for what they saw as a vague and inadequate response to an inevitable threat.

"The administration was slow. There just weren't enough people in the White House that took it seriously," Obama said in an interview.

He said there were still areas of Bush's plan that fell short of his own legislation, including how money will be allocated among state and local officials, the education of Americans on the avian flu and the number of people who would have access to antiviral drugs.

Slow reaction charged

But the most important, Obama said, was the failure of the president to clearly identify who would be in charge in the event of an influenza outbreak.

"One of the things we saw with Katrina was that one of the most important things is having somebody who's accountable and that everybody knows is in charge. That's not been identified, and that lack of coordination concerns me," he said.

Japan, England and France are among nations that have stockpiled enough antiviral drugs for more than a quarter of their citizens, while the United States has only enough of the treatment to cover 2 percent of the population.

The Bush plan calls for the purchase of enough vaccine for 20 million people and the stockpiling of additional antiviral drugs by 2010.

Obama contended that a larger stockpile of vaccines and antiviral drugs could have been available sooner had the Bush administration listened to concerns over the avian flu earlier.

"We just have to cross our fingers that we don't have a pandemic outbreak in the next year. Because there's no way for us to ramp up," he said.