Leavitt: States will ration bird flu vaccine
Local authorities should set priorities, health secretary says
Tuesday, June 6, 2006
WASHINGTON (AP) -- States will get to decide how to ration scarce vaccine if bird flu triggers a worldwide epidemic, the nation's health secretary said Tuesday -- a decision that means where someone lives could determine his or her protection.
"Let's acknowledge the fact that for the first six months of any pandemic, we're not going to have a vaccine," Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt told The Associated Press.
Once doses start being produced, "this is a battle that'll be fought in thousands of communities simultaneously. What's working in one community may not work as well in another," Leavitt said in a joint interview with Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns.
The United States is girding against the deadly H5N1 strain of bird influenza on two fronts: what to do if this virus one day mutates into a form easily spread among people and makes its way here via ill travelers -- and, more immediately, what to do if it gets here in a migrating wild bird.
Testing of wild birds, a total of 100,000 by year's end, has begun in an attempt to catch the virus early if it does arrive that way -- with some labs beginning to use a new test that can tell within just four hours if a bird is possibly infected, Johanns said....
http://www.cnn.com/2006/HEALTH/conditions/06/06/bird.flu.test.ap/index.html
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