Scrounging for Tamiflu
It's the start of flu season, time to get a flu shot and stock up on tissues. It's the plain old seasonal influenza, the kind that strikes every year. But from the chatter at a pharmacy counter in Montgomery County, Md., you'd think it was avian flu season. All anybody wanted to talk about was the antiviral drug Tamiflu.
"It's the bird flu," pharmacist Emmanuel Tesfay told one customer, explaining why the store wasn't able to fill a Tamiflu prescription, which the person wanted to tuck away in the sock drawer just in case. "If you call around you might get lucky, but our wholesaler is totally out." In the past few weeks, Tesfay says, the pharmacy has received dozens of requests for the antiflu drug, a run he attributed to heightened fears that the H5N1 avian influenza bug could spark a deadly global pandemic.
The bad bug is still far from American shores, but it's been moving ever closer from its roots in Asia. In midsummer, it was detected in poultry and wild birds in Russia and Kazakhstan. Earlier in October, H5N1 was found in poultry in Turkey and Romania. Today, the European Union confirmed that bird flu has been detected in swans in Croatia. Germany is doing further testing to determine if the bird flu killing wild geese there is H5N1. The more birds are infected, the greater the odds that the virus could mutate into a form that could spread easily from human to human. So far, 63 people are known to have died of bird flu, all of them in Asia.
Most infectious disease experts doubt that this will be the season when bird flu mutates into a killer virus. But nobody's betting the house on it. At the same time, state and local health officials, having watched with dismay the federal government's dismal response to Hurricane Katrina, are becoming increasingly pessimistic about getting much help from Washington if a flu pandemic hits soon. That's why they are devising plans to maintain public services if many workers are home caring for sick family members or are sick themselves.
What's more, the federal government has yet to release its long-awaited bird-flu response plan, once slated to be wrapped up by summer's end. For months, the main worrywarts were infectious-disease specialists, who see the disease's spread through Asia as all too similar to the 1918 flu pandemic that killed millions worldwide. In recent weeks, the public has gotten worried, too, wondering how people will keep their families safe in a pandemic. Scrounging around for Tamiflu is just the start.
Earlier this week, Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt joined Julie Gerberding, head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and acting Food and Drug Administration head Andrew Von Eschenbach in urging people to get a regular flu shot. The seasonal flu kills about 36,000 Americans a year. But the press wanted to hear about bird flu. What it heard wasn't wholly reassuring. "We have some concerns that there may be a threat of counterfeiting with Tamiflu," Gerberding said. Von Eschenbach said the FDA is working to get more antiviral drugs in the pipeline and is talking to the National Board of Pharmacy about putting a seal of approval on reliable Internet pharmacies.
Leavitt, who just returned from Asia, where he had learned more about the continuing outbreaks of bird flu, will give a major speech on the topic in Washington on Thursday.
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