Long-Predicted Flu Finally Tops Agenda
By David Brown
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, November 7, 2005; Page A01
....Last week, President Bush asked Congress for $7.1 billion to confront the threat, and the administration released a massive and long-awaited flu preparedness plan. Today, U.S. health officials and experts are in Geneva for a three-day international meeting on how to stop the spread of a potential pandemic virus that has begun spreading around the world.
But it took more than an earnest and angry Cabinet secretary (former HHS Secretary Tommy Thompson) to get the country's attention. It took four more years of cajoling, the reappearance of "bird flu" in Asia with a chilling trickle of human deaths, a vaccine debacle, Bush's summer reading, migrating birds and a hurricane. Ironically, the events of Sept. 11 may also have prompted action.
Whatever the reasons, pandemic flu has now arrived -- not the disease, but the issue. The latest milestone in its march into the public eye was last week's release of the "pandemic influenza plan" -- 396 pages of dire prediction and advice. It is the plan Thompson was asking about four years ago.
"There is no question that the tipping point has finally arrived," Thompson, now a private consultant, said recently. "I'm sorry it wasn't two years ago."
But the seemingly overnight appearance of worries about pandemic flu on the front pages and in water-cooler conversations is misleading. The subject has been evolving out of sight for years -- much like the virus itself....
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/06/AR2005110601282.html?sub=AR
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