Bird flu expected to hit U.S. in 2 years

By Jim Maniaci
Cibola County Bureau

GRANTS — The world's most deadly flu epidemic is expected by the best guesses currently available to hit the U.S. within two years.

This was the warning given to the Grants-Milan Rotary Club on Tuesday by a University of New Mexico specialist helping organize pilot projects in two of the state's 33 counties, Cibola and Grant.

Meetings in the area will take place from September to November, Margo White said. The sessions are aimed at "turning a paper plan into a community effort... You don't know how many talents you have to share from the group itself, (talents) which will be needed. We won't have the system as usual; we won't have life as usual."

White said, "You don't want to be exchanging business cards at the time the disaster starts. You need to know people in the community, and who does what beforehand. You need to develop your talents and your skills, including time care. The hospitals cannot manage it. They will have their limited capacity.

"Everyone in the community will need to work together, to be supportive when school closes, when students are home, when child care is no longer possible. In the community, people will be on their own. Helping others who can't stockpile, you should be able to do it. I don't have a lot of solutions, but people will come up with solutions, given the opportunity to do it."

Vince Ashley, Cibola General Hospital's administrator, said his staff has been stockpiling so much of what will be needed, for instance masks, that CGH has run out of storage space.

"We'll look like a fortress," he predicted, because everyone entering will have to be screened. With a staff which he expects will be decimated by the deadly illness, he said emergency triage ranking patients in the order to be treated based on their condition will have to be imposed.

White repeated what might happen, as well as her theme of everybody has to help everybody else, many times.

She also distributed a sheet on the characteristics and challenges. It said in the 20th Century the U.S. lost a half-million people in the 1918 flu pandemic the shorter term used to describe a world-wide epidemic with 70,000 Americans dying from the flu in 1957 and 34,000 in 1968.

White said the problem is "unprecedented."

The virus H5N1 infects birds, which fly long distances. Wild birds can infect domestic flocks and then get passed on to humans when they come into contact with the domestic birds.

She compared a virus to a bunch of hoodlums who go into an expensive neighborhood looking for clothing because they expect to find huge closets in a big house. "They mix and match and swap until they get what they want," she said.

And when they depart they trash the place because, "It's all they know how to do."

Because of, among other things, the world's transportation system, it will spread widely, health care systems will be overloaded, medical supplies will be inadequate and there will be disruptions to the economy and society. For instance, she said, schools will have to be shut down and automatic teller machines will run out of currency because there won't be enough people to refill them.

She called the situation "an opportunity to begin to mobilize all the resources that you have and all the known skills, unknown skills, forgotten skills (such as) preserving and canning food, developing new capacities for home care that we all can learn."

The flu is expected to hit in two or three waves, each lasting up to two months, he cautioned.

To contact reporter Jim Maniaci in Grants, telephone 285-6184 or (505) 870-7775 (cellular).