WASHINGTON -- The first appearance in America of the deadly avian flu may well be in birds migrating from Asia to Alaska, three Bush Cabinet secretaries said Monday.
"It is increasingly likely that we will detect a highly pathogenic H5N1 strain of avian flu in birds within the U.S. borders, possibly as early as this year," Interior Secretary Gale Norton said.
But she and other officials emphasized during an hour-long media briefing that a bird testing positive for the virus does not mean the disease will become widespread among humans. The message was that people need to be prepared, not scared.
The virus, which has appeared in Europe, Africa and Asia, can spread from birds to people, but there's no evidence this type of flu can be transmitted from person to person. Most human cases so far were in people who had close contact with diseased poultry or virus-contaminated bird blood or droppings.
"At this point, if you're a bird, it's a pandemic," said Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt. "If you're a human being, it's not."
But Leavitt presented a far grimmer view Monday than Norton or Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns. This strain of avian flu is "highly lethal" and there is no human immunity, he said. It has killed at least 98 people worldwide since 2003 and has a mortality rate of about 50 percent. Genetically and in the symptoms humans get, it looks very similar to the Spanish Influenza of 1918, he said, referring to a pandemic that killed at least 20 million people in two years.
Leavitt said the government has learned lessons from its bungled response to Hurricane Katrina, but his examples suggested that the response to an avian flu pandemic would be even worse. After most natural disasters, health-care workers can come from elsewhere in the country to staff clinics in the affected zone. But a pandemic strikes everywhere, he said, and each community needs all the resources it has. It also lasts longer -- a year to 18 months, he said.
Cities, schools and churches need to develop their own response plans, he said. Businesses should consider how they would keep going if a significant number of their employees are unavailable for weeks at a time.
"Any community that fails to prepare with the expectation that the federal government will, at the last moment, be able to come to the rescue will be tragically wrong," he said.
The government is stockpiling Tamiflu and other antiviral drugs, and it is supporting the development of flu vaccines, he said. It is also gathering masks and ventilators, he said. But "there is no way in which 5,000 different communities can be responded to simultaneously," he warned.
His delivery, to an auditorium full of reporters, was staid, but his words stood out from the let's-not-panic speeches of the other government briefers.
Norton said the government is stepping up its monitoring of wild birds. It plans to take samples this year from 75,000 to 100,000 live and dead wild birds.
The role of wild birds in the spread of the disease is unknown, she said, but they are frequently its victims and can serve as an early warning system.
"In Europe, unusual deaths of swans and other wild birds were an early indication of the arrival of the highly pathogenic strain of H5N1," she said.
Much of the monitoring effort will concentrate on Alaska, particularly Western Alaska, the North Slope and the Interior.
Robert Leedy, chief of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife's Alaska office of migratory bird management, said he expects to take as many as 9,000 samples from live birds and another 3,000 from birds caught by subsistence hunters. The government is enlisting the Yukon-Kuskokwim Health Corp. and other regional agencies to help with that sampling. It is also planning an "extensive outreach" to villagers, asking them to report any bird die-offs they witness, he said.
The government is not advising bird hunters to avoid eating their catch but to follow "routine precautions." The advice includes:
• Wear rubber or latex gloves when cleaning game.
• Thoroughly wash hands, knives and other objects that touch game.
• Don't eat, drink or smoke while cleaning game.
• Cook all game meat to at least 165 degrees, because heat kills the virus.
• Don't touch birds found dead or obviously sick.
There have been no known cases of a person catching the H5N1 virus from wild birds, Norton said. The more likely route is for wild birds to spread it to poultry.
It is easier to control the spread of the disease in the United States, Johanns said, because the poultry industry is highly consolidated and the birds are largely indoors, isolated from most people and other animals. In other countries, domestic birds live in a family's yard or in the house, he said.
Reporter Liz Ruskin can be reached at lrusking@adn.com.
