Our Commitment to Pandemic Preparedness

The threat of an influenza pandemic is one of the most important health threats that we face today. At HHS, one of our top priorities is to work with states to prepare against this threat.

President Bush and Secretary Leavitt are currently mobilizing the nation to prepare for a pandemic, and Congress has acted by passing $6.1 billion for preparedness efforts, including support for state preparedness emergency funding. So far, we have released $325 million in funding to assist with state and local preparation.

Of that, Alaska has already received first-round funding of nearly $660,000. These funds will enable you to accelerate current planning efforts against the threat of a pandemic and prepare to act upon the plans.

We are also releasing another $225 million for states this fall, including more than $930,000 for Alaska. Though we won´t distribute the funds until October or November, in the meantime, starting on August 31, states can access 20% of the funds, within the award for the larger Public Health Emergency Preparedness Cooperative Agreement. This round of funding is to support four areas:

1. To address gaps discovered from previous assessments;
2. To plan and conduct three exercises, mass vaccination clinics, community containment strategies, and medical surge capacity;
3. To complete an intrastate antiviral distribution plan; and
4. To submit the state´s Pandemic Influenza plan to HHS and to DHS for review.

Last April, I spoke at the Alaska State Pandemic Flu Summit in Anchorage, and since then, you have risen to the challenge, and have held nine out of a planned fifteen preparedness conferences in communities around the state. Your state agencies are partnering and working together. You have been practicing dispensing vaccines on the community level. You have established hotlines. You have invested your own state monies in pandemic planning and preparedness. I would like to thank everyone in Alaska who has risen to the challenge of the possibility of a pandemic.

At HHS, our preparation efforts have consisted of a number of objectives, from stockpiling countermeasures and developing vaccines to setting up local plans and communications strategies.

Right now, I´d like to focus on one aspect of preparation in particular, disease monitoring.

Think of the world as a vast forest, thick with underbrush and dead trees. It is very vulnerable to fire, a single spark can burst into an inferno that is difficult to put out. But if you are there right after the fire ignites, you can stomp it out and limit the damage. We believe a pandemic operates similarly. If we are able to discover problematic strains of avian flu quickly, we can stomp them out, delaying the onset and decreasing the severity of possible pandemics.

That is why we are building a network of nations to cooperate in disease monitoring, with the help of $251 million that President Bush requested and Congress approved to detect and contain outbreaks before they spread around the world. A few weeks ago, for example, Secretary Leavitt and the Vietnamese Minister of Health signed an agreement of promising to work together on such health issues as emerging infectious diseases and avian influenza. And this past February, I signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the President of Institut Pasteur to bring our networks of researchers and scientists together to collaborate on avian influenza research and surveillance activities.

We are just as watchful on the domestic front. To help detect the H5N1 strain of avian influenza if and when it arrives on U.S. soil, two months ago, the National Animal Health Laboratory Network certified this Department of Environmental Conservation Environmental Health Laboratory to test for avian influenza. This lab will allow us to test within hours, rather than days, suspect birds for the H5 and H7 subtypes in a safe, valid, and reliable manner.

We are also monitoring especially closely avian influenza among wild bird populations, because wild migratory birds serve as an early detection system for the highly pathogenic H5N1 avian influenza virus. Wildlife biologists, migratory bird specialists, veterinarians, and epidemiologists from the Department of Agriculture and the Department of Interior, as well as from HHS, along with the International Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies, National Association of Public Health Veterinarians, and the State of Alaska have developed "An Early Detection System for Asian H5N1 Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza in Wild Migratory Birds, U.S. Interagency Strategic Plan."

The interagency plan outlines five strategies for early detection of the virus in wild migratory birds:

1. Investigating morbidity and mortality in wild birds;
2. Monitoring live yet apparently healthy wild birds;
3. Monitoring birds killed by hunters;
4. Using sentinel species; and
5. Collecting environmental samples.

Because Alaska is at the crossroads of bird migration flyways, we believe the H5N1 strain of avian influenza currently affecting Southeast Asia would most likely arrive there if it does spread through wild migratory birds. So we are focusing on a prioritized sampling system with emphasis in Alaska, followed by the Central, Mississippi, and Atlantic flyways. Throughout 2006, field specialists and wildlife biologists from USDA and other partner groups plan to collect between 75,000 and 100,000 samples from live and dead wild birds. They are also planning on collecting 50,000 samples of water or feces from high-risk waterfowl habitats across the United States.

Most recently, a report from Azerbaijan states that people contracted avian influenza after plucking feathers from wild swans involved in a massive die-off near their village. Laboratory tests have shown that the swans died of the H5N1 strain of avian influenza. The available evidence, though not conclusive, suggests that the handling of the dead swans was the most likely cause for their infection. This case reaffirms how important it is for all of us to avoid direct contact with dead wild birds and to report wild bird die-offs to the appropriate authorities.

Preparation runs along a continuum. We won´t ever become completely prepared or finished and done with our preparation efforts. Each day that we prepare, we make ourselves a little more ready and more capable of an effective response. We´re not prepared yet. But, thanks to the dedicated technicians at this laboratory, we´re more prepared today than we were yesterday. And the more we are all aware of the threat, the more we´ll be prepared tomorrow than we were today. Thank you.