If epidemic hits, county to be ready

Published 9:00 pm Tuesday, April 5, 2005

Last year, Washington got an early indication of the effort it would take to respond to avian or bird flu, which could trigger a deadly worldwide flu epidemic.

Within a mile of the U.S.-Canadian border, domestic poultry flocks in British Columbia were found to be infected with the virus.

While no infected chickens were found in Washington state, Canadian health officials destroyed 17 million birds before the disease was finally declared eradicated in July.

The event underscored the need for Washington to have ongoing surveillance for the disease in the state’s 5.9 million chickens. The new monitoring system is expected to begin within the next month, said Linda Carpenter, a veterinarian who assists the state agriculture department with emergency planning.

Meanwhile, local and state public health officials, including those in Snohomish County, are now at work on their own plans for how to react to this or other virulent forms of flu spread among people.

The last big global flu epidemic was in 1968, “so we’re due,” said Dr. Jo Hofmann, the state Health Department’s epidemiologist for communicable disease.

That agency’s statewide plan is expected within the next month.

Bird flu has killed several dozen people in Asia in recent years, though none of them was believed to be human-to-human transmission. There have been no reported human cases in the U.S.

Earlier this year, officials with the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned that bird flu could pose a threat to humans worldwide and could cause the worst pandemic, or worldwide epidemic, in human history.

In Washington, as many as 1 million people could become ill from a flu pandemic. Of those, 10,000 to 18,000 could be hospitalized and 2,800 to 5,600 could die, according to Donn Moyer, state Health Department spokesman.

To help coordinate international efforts in the Pacific Northwest, health officials from Washington, Alaska, Idaho and Oregon will join Canadian provincial representatives in Vancouver, B.C., on April 19 and 20, drawing up cross-border coordination plans for dealing with a worldwide flu outbreak.

So far, avian flu has been spread when infected poultry are in close contact with humans. However, health officials fear the virus could mutate so that it’s easily spread human to human.

No vaccine against bird flu is expected to be available for many months or up to a year.

“Until the virus jumps from person to person you don’t have a situation where you know exactly how to build the vaccine,” said Alonzo Plough, who directs the public health agency in Seattle and King County.

And there are only limited supplies of another weapon against the disease, anti-viral drugs, such as Tamiflu, said Dr. Yuan-Po Tu, a physician who tracks influenza issues for The Everett Clinic, which has 270,000 patients. The drug is not cheap, costing $65 to $70 a dose, he said.

If a pandemic seemed imminent, moving to different continents, a federal public health emergency would be declared, Plough said.

That would kick the state and local plans into action.

“This would be a very big deal,” Plough said. “It would not be a business-as-usual or life-as-usual situation.”

Steps would be taken to isolate and quarantine patients. Travel to and from affected areas would be limited.

School and sports events would be cancelled. If there is no vaccine, health officials also would ask that people providing nonessential services stay home from work, Plough said.

“All you could do is increase the social distance between people to stop the spread of disease,” he said.

“We are … trying to get people to understand that most of the activities that public health would be able to do in the first few months would be to mitigate, but not prevent the impact of this flu, which would have a high mortality rate,” Plough said.

“This is not the garden variety flu,” he said. “Some people are saying that the difference between the yearly flu and pandemic flu is the difference between a goldfish and a killer shark – totally different in impact and severity.”

Reporter Sharon Salyer: 425-339-3486 or salyer@ heraldnet.com.