Avian Flu Preparedness

Hello. This is Senator Barack Obama and today is Wednesday, October 5, 2005. Welcome to my podcast. I want to talk a little bit today about Avian Flu.

Some of you may have noticed that it's been receiving some attention lately. About nine months ago I became interested in this issue partly as a consequence of researching why our general production of flu vaccines was so poor in this country. Some of you remembered the vaccine shortages that we had and that was a problem in Illinois as it was in many other states. During the course of my research I started getting more interested in the bird flu or the Avian Flu. Partly this is prompted by the fact that I grew up in Hawaii and Indonesia and, as a consequence having spent a lot of time in Asia, was familiar with how influenzas from livestock can jump rapidly to humans in these environments where the poultry industry, or the pigs, or other animals are kept in peoples backyards.

It turns out that, in fact, we've got the potential for the sort of pandemic that we have not seen in this country since 1918 when the Spanish Flu swept the entire world and tens of millions of people were killed. It was the single biggest killer in the past century and scientists recognize that periodically what happens is these pandemics occur where flu viruses that have never been seen before by living populations suddenly develop, have mutated from existing animal flues, and that suddenly there is some mechanism for human to human transmission. Once that happens you've got a new flu strain that nobody has any immunity from and it can sweep through a population extraordinarily rapidly.

So here's the current situation. We have already seen flu transmitted from birds to humans in Asia. About 160 people have already died from it during the last couple of years. What we haven't seen yet is efficient human to human transmission which is what is required to spread the disease, but we can't wait for that to happen and here's why. Basically there are some antiviral treatments that are available to help people survive a flu outbreak of this sort. Unfortunately, we need about 80-100 million of these antiviral drugs and right now we have about 1 million.

So we only have about one percent of what we need. Were going to have to rapidly ramp up our stockpiles in order to protect our population. Long term we've got to develop a vaccine and right now our system for creating vaccines is antiquated. It's not well developed. We would need 300 million vaccines for a flu of this type and right now we can produce less than one million, even if we had the appropriate vaccine and we knew how this virus was going to mutate.

So it's important for us not to be panicked, but it is important for us to take this seriously and what we've done here in the Senate, in addition to some early appropriations I had done for monitoring and surveillance in Asian countries so that we can catch this rapidly and coordinate with international agencies. What we've now done is appropriated in the Senate 3.9 billion dollars that will be used to purchase the kinds of antiviral drugs and to set up the vaccine infrastructure that'll be needed. It's important that local and state governments are also brought into the mix and that's why we've called for the creation of an independent coordinator of our initiatives in this area.

We hope that the White House is going to be on top of this. I think that the President, having knowledge that this is a potential crisis of Katrina-like proportions if we don't prepare, is taking the right first step. It's a little late, but better late than never and if you are interested in more information about this issue, please get on our website. We've got versions of various pieces of legislation that, not only have I introduced, but also have been worked on by some of my other colleagues.

Thanks for listening to this podcast and please tell your friends that we are going to be doing this every single week. Bye-bye.