Avian Flu - Meds by Mail

[Guest Guest]

U.S. mail may deploy medicine in emergency

 

Government looking for new ways to distribute drugs, says HHS secretary

 

The Associated Press

Updated: 5:26 p.m. ET Aug. 2, 2005

 

 

WASHINGTON - In the event of a flu pandemic or a bioterrorism attack, help could arrive via door-to-door mail delivery or from the fire station down the street, Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt said Tuesday.

 

Leavitt, in an hour-long interview with Associated Press reporters and editors, said it’s clear that the system of delivering medicines in the United States is inadequate in the event of an emergency.

 

He said it was “in some ways an absolute certainty” that a flu pandemic would occur. “If it happens anywhere, there is risk everywhere,” he said.

 

The federal government is particularly concerned about bird flu, which since 2004 has sickened 109 people, 55 of whom have died, because people lack immunity to the virus.

 

Leavitt said the federal government was looking to stockpile 20 million doses of a bird flu vaccine and another 20 million doses of Tamiflu, an antiviral medication to treat the disease.

 

The vaccine, in human clinical trials, has created an immune response in those who had taken it, he said. Still to be determined, he said, is how much is necessary to produce a sufficient response.

 

Medicine delivered within 12 hours

Leavitt said the government’s goal is to have the medicine delivered within 12 hours of decision to deploy the medicine, but that exercises have revealed flaws in the delivery system.

 

“We’re finding that the distributions systems are not adequate to put medicines in the hands of people fast enough, so we’re beginning to look at alternative ways to speed that up,” Leavitt said.

 

“We’re looking at having more points of distribution, for example. We’re experimenting with having the postal service being able to deliver them, because they walk those routes every day.”

 

He said other possibilities included using firehouses as distribution points.

 

Leavitt said that it would take four to six months to mass produce a vaccine for the avian flu, and that capacity is insufficient to produce both a vaccine for pandemic flu as well as avian flu.

 

“One of the difficulties is if in fact we end up with a pandemic flu vaccine needing to be produced, it does compromise our ability to produce both the annual flu and the pandemic flu vaccine,” he said. “We’re in the process of doing aggressive contingency planning to determine how we can ratchet up production dramatically.”

 

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/8801097/pri...splaymode/1098/

[gardnmom]

The best way for most of us to protect ourselves is to quarentine ourselves.... The need for such action should propel in into a prep mode to make sure we are able to avoid getting this stuff. Have to do some reading to see how long previous epidemics have lasted.

[redhenfarm]

Interesting, Mare.

I used to have to pull together the form where we ordered flu vaccine at the job from he double toothpicks and we always had to do it by June for the fall supply. We never knew exactly when it would get there until it got there. Seems like it got there later October or early November. So it's interesting to consider this being supplied by mail. With last years flu vaccine supply shortages and then overages one wonders how it would be during an epidemic.