We're Doomed, Bird Flu edition

From Knight-Ridder:

Experts praise the administration's new urgency.

But some said the administration should have moved faster and earlier and that it seemed to be responding to the political drubbing that Bush suffered for the initially slow federal response to Hurricane Katrina.

"People at the White House are now ... starting to recognize ... that this country is not prepared," said Jerry Hauer, who directed HHS emergency preparedness for two years until he quit in 2004, charging that his superiors were foot-dragging on the avian flu threat.

Bill Hall, an HHS spokesman, denied that the department had been slow. He said that its experts have been digesting "thousands, upon thousands, upon thousands" of public comments on the draft plan.

He declined, however, to confirm any details of the blueprint.

Rex Archer, director of the Kansas City Health Department and president of the Association of State and Territorial Health Officers, said Washington should be treating preparedness "more like a Manhattan Project," the crash atomic-bomb development program of World War II.

A number of other countries are ahead of the United States in preparedness. Britain finalized its plan in March, has created a Cabinet-level coordinating office, ordered enough Tamiflu for 25 percent of its population and put in place a system for rapidly producing and distributing a vaccine once one is developed.

Critics complain that the Bush administration has ordered only enough Tamiflu to cover less than 2 percent of the U.S. population, despite a 2000 recommendation by the U.N. World Health Organization that governments cover at least 25 percent.

Swiss-based Hoffmann-LaRoche, the sole maker of Tamiflu, says that with 25 other countries ahead of it, the United States must wait until the end of 2007 to buy enough of the drug to cover 25 percent of its population.

The Infectious Diseases Society of America says even that isn't enough; it wants HHS to stockpile enough Tamiflu to treat 50 percent of the U.S. public.