By LEE BOWMAN
Scripps Howard News Service
November 15, 2004
- Government scientists - sure that somewhere out there a bird flu virus has humanity's name on it - are speeding up efforts to understand how the viruses evolve and spread.
On Monday, just two days after World Health Organization officials urged increased efforts to prepare for a new pandemic virus, researchers at the National Institute of Health announced two initiatives to get ahead of a new outbreak.
"There is a need to raise the profile of pandemic preparedness as a matter of national security planning," said Dr. Klaus Stohr, director of the WHO's influenza branch, who convened a meeting of vaccine makers and health officials in Geneva last week. "We have a unique opportunity to get our homework done to ensure that when it matters most, vaccine production can happen immediately."
Officials at the meeting conceded that even if a new pandemic strain were to emerge today, no vaccine maker would be able to respond to the threat before next summer.
NIH officials are laying the groundwork for a quicker response, setting up a program to sequence the genetic maps of thousands of known flu viruses and developing computer models that can predict how a bird flu might spread among humans.
Flu viruses are difficult to battle "because they undergo continual genetic changes that enable them to evade the body's immune response and sometimes become more virulent," said Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
"This project is the influenza virus equivalent of the human genome project," said Robert Webster, a leading flu researcher at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, Tenn. The hospital has a collection of more than 12,000 bird flu viruses assembled over the past 27 years and will be the site for sequencing their genes.
Other scientific partners will work on blueprints of human flu viruses. "Our goal is to provide scientists with the infrastructure they need to uncover potential targets for new vaccines, therapies and diagnostics against influenza," said Maria Giovanni, who oversees the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases' Microbial Sequencing Center.
The worry among public health officials is that a virus similar to the N5N1 bird flu that is raging across Asia would mutate to be easily spread from person to person. Although the virus does infect people - killing at least 32 in Thailand and Vietnam - it appears to spread only through direct contact with poultry.
While historic records suggest that a new deadly virus strain could spread around the world in less than six months and affect as much as a third of the population - and kill 1 percent - officials are unsure how the outbreak might start.
To better understand that question, a group of researchers sponsored by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences is building a computer model to simulate an outbreak of H5N1 in a hypothetical Southeast Asian community of about 500,000 people living in neighboring small towns. The models, which will be available by early next year, allows researchers to take into account things like population ages; distribution of schools, hospitals and clinics; and the extent of travel and infectiousness of the virus.
"We can see what would happen if we take certain actions, like vaccinating specific groups, using antiviral medications, restricting travel or implement other public health measures," explained Irene Eckstrand, program officer for the study.
Overall, the Department of Health and Human Services expects to spend more than $216 million on flu research and preparedness this year, including $58 million on vaccine and drug development.
Included in that effort are contracts with Aventis Pasteur and Chiron Corp. to make about 2 million doses of an experimental vaccine against the H5N1 strain, although Chiron's ability to take part depends on a the outcome of a safety inspection of a British manufacturing facility next month. British health officials shuttered a larger Chiron plant in October due to bacterial contamination concerns that took 48 million doses of flu vaccine out of the American supply chain.
Scientists say for any pandemic vaccine to be effective, serum makers would have to be able to produce millions of doses within a few weeks, rather than the six to eight months lead time for making just 300 million doses a year against common flu strains now.
That will require both rapid isolation of the new strain and rapid production, perhaps of a genetically weakened live virus vaccine that could be administered through the nose, rather than by injection as most flu shots are now.
On the Net: www.nih.gov
www.who.org