Bird Flu Threatens Taiwan
By Lesley Perez, 11.10.05

As the fear of a mutating bird flu grips the globe, Taiwan hopes for the best.

“It will happen in Taiwan,” said Tamkang University student Jessie Liu. “It’s just time.”

In response to the negative outlook, people are being carefully monitored in an effort to protect the population from a pandemic.

“It is required to take temperature,” said Professor Ai-Ling Wang. “Each time you get into your office or school, it’s mandatory.”

Jessie, who is also a nurse at Mackay Memorial Hospital in, Taiwan, said that patients are also being carefully watched over.

“We always take the temperature from the patients,” Liu said. “We wear the masks and when the patient has a fever we ask them to what country they have traveled.”

Although no cases of human infection have been reported in Taiwan, the concern is still present.

“Many birds and chickens were killed here,” Wang said.

The feared perpetrator is the H5N1 strain of avian influenza, known as bird flu. Making its first appearance in 1997 in Hong Kong, H5N1 has taken the lives of over 100 people - 62 of those since 2003 in Asia alone. Most of the victims were poultry farmers infected by sick birds.

Although H5N1 is still chiefly a bird problem, experts fear that soon the strain will mutate and be transmissible from human to human. According to a CBS news report, this is likely to happen if someone infected with the human flu simultaneously gets infected with the bird flu causing genes to be exchanged.

“This is still primarily a problem in birds. From time to time we’ll see a human case,” said Dr. Julie Gerberding, director of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, on a CBS broadcast. “We’re not seeing sustained transmission so there’s still a chance that we can prepare and prevent this from affecting people here in this country [U.S.].”

The most important defense against any flu strain is a vaccine, said Gerberding. This, requires obtaining the virus and developing a vaccine seed strain.

“Today it would take about six months from the time that we obtained the virus to the time we would have enough doses of the vaccine to protect Americans,” Gerberding said.

Currently, the most popular defense against this virus is Tamiflu.

“Tamiflu, a pill introduced in 1999, is one of two drugs called neuraminidase inhibitors that appear to be effective against all kinds of flu, including bird flu,” according to a CBS online report.

The U.S. is now in the process of expanding its Tamiflu stockpile.

“We’ll be able to accumulate a larger stockpile over time,” Gerberding said.

In the meantime, some countries have placed bans on imported poultry as the incidents of H5N1 spread to mainland Europe.

And those in infected countries are left waiting for a solution.

“We have no medicine now,” Liu said.

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