American Tamiflu Efforts

The United States is beginning to take the bird flu threat much more seriously these days with an announcement from the U.S. Health Secretary, Mike Leavitt that he has given orders for a large amount of the bird flu drug Tamiflu to be sent to a secret and secure location in an unidentified Asian nation. The idea is that it would be a safe and easily acessible stock of Tamiflu that would be under US control and it could be quickly deployed anywhere in the world where it was needed.

The announcement was made in Geneva at the AGM of United Nation's World Health Organisation and the Health Secretary specified that while the Tamiflu belonged to the US it may consider using it to help other nations that were in need of help and were suffering from a bird flu crisis. Tamiflu is considered to be an essential tool in the containment of the H5N1 virus as well as a drug for curing individuals from the virus. If the US felt that they needed the Tamiflu more urgently at home it would be sent back immediately to add to the already existing stockpiles of Tamiflu in America.

The United States has been criticised for having very low stocks of Tamiflu and is rapidly trying to build them up. It has at present only enough Tamiflu just under 10% of American Citizens and is making efforts to increase this figure.

The biggest concern for the international community at the moment regarding bird flu comes from Indonesia where the outbreaks of bird flu have killed many people and the Indonesian government has been notoriously lax in getting to the source of the outbreaks and hospitals are not competently equipped to deal with a big outbreak should one occur. In fact a recent case had 2 bird flu patients being released from hospital and sent back home which would be lethal should the bird flu virus mutate into a human to human virus.