As a Canadian, I watched last night's Iowa results with interest and bemusement. We pick our leaders very differently here in Canada, but Iowans seemed happy with their system. And in today's blog chatter, I heard now and then about Barack Obama's stand on avian flu, about which I'd known nothing.
What would we do without Google? A quick check found this news release, dated August 9, 2005—almost two and a half years ago: Obama Calls on U.S. to Stockpile Avian Flu Drugs to Guard Against Pandemic. Excerpt:
In a letter to Health and Human Services Secretary Michael O. Leavitt, U.S. Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) today asked the Bush administration to immediately begin creating a stockpile of avian flu vaccines and antivirals sufficient to protect 25 percent of the U.S. population.
"It has been estimated that with no vaccine or antiviral drugs, 93 million Americans would be infected with avian flu, and 164,000 would die," said Obama. "However, if an effective vaccine is provided to 80 percent of individuals younger than 19 years of age, the estimated numbers decrease to 6 million total cases and 15,000 total deaths. A sufficient supply of antivirals could have the same protective effect."
Recent news reports indicate that the avian flu vaccine by Sanofi Pasteur may be effective in preventing the disease. However, the vaccine was only proven to be effective when administered at a high dose, which means that the 2 million vaccines doses already acquired by the government would protect only about 450,000 Americans. Similarly, the current supply of the antiviral used to prevent and treat avian flu is grossly inadequate.
I don't know where Obama got his statistics, but he understood the basic issues, back in the summer of 2005, better than most of us do today.
In October 2005 he delivered a podcast on the same subject, and the link will take you to a transcript of it.
Maybe all the other Democratic and Republican candidates have similar views on pandemic influenza, and if so, I'll be glad to link to them here. But for now, Obama looks like a shoo-in as next President of Flublogia.
