Bush's Biodefense Advisor: We're Not Ready for Pandemic Disease

The United States won't close its borders if there's an overseas bird flu outbreak, announced the Bush Administration's biodefense advisor yesterday.

“The reality is that there are tremendous challenges to sealing our borders to begin with,” said Dr. Rajeev Venkayya, special assistant to the president for biodefense. “Secondly, we believe that if a pandemic virus emerges anywhere in the globe, it is inevitable that it will arrive here in the U.S. irrespective of the actions we take at the borders.”

That might seem like a fatalistic prediction, but there's something refreshing about its honesty. A total border shutdown would be disastrous economically and ineffective medically; better to cut back on international flights, scan new arrivals for disease and be prepared for an outbreak when it happens. But as Venkayya went on to say, we're not ready for that, either.

“Just to be brutally honest, we have a lot of trouble determining when we have an outbreak of disease in a community here in the U.S.,” Dr.
Venkayya said. “We need to have uniform biosurveillance capability to prepare not only for a pandemic, but any outbreak of infectious disease.”

The nation also has little extra capacity in its hospitals and other health care facilities to deal with a huge surge in need that would accompany a mass disease outbreak, Dr. Venkayya said. And the government has little ability to ensure that during an outbreak, when many workers would stay home, limited Internet capacity would go to essential work and not to children playing video games, officials said.

(How did an apparently straight-shooting guy like Rajeev Venkayya get this job, anyways? Has he just been pretending to drink his Bush
Administration public relations kool-aid, then giving it to the dog when Karl Rove's back is turned?)

We've recently covered the country's disastrous disease surveillance program.
This is seriously disturbing, scary stuff -- and not just because of avian influenza, which some say is an overblown threat. Whether or not bird flu makes the human jump, nearly every global public health expert agrees that climate change, social instability, population growth and modern travel habits are a recipe for epidemics.

While the Bush administration has focused on bioterror, earmarking billions of dollars for (sloppy) research on largely hypothetical threats, clear and present disease dangers have received the political equivalent of pocket change.

Come next elections, this deserves to be a serious political issue.

Limited Capacity Is Seen in Flu Defenses [New York Times]