Along with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on the federal level, local health departments are keeping close watch on the new avian flu outbreak in China. Dr. Cherie Drenzek, state epidemiologist at the Georgia Department of Public Health, answered a few questions this week.
Q: Should we be concerned with bird flu in China here in the U.S.?
A: Yes. The fact that there's a novel influenza virus infecting humans anywhere in the world is of global concern. Any time there is a brand-new flu virus, it raises the potential that the virus could become pandemic and spread to other areas of the world rapidly. So far, the evidence in China has shown that this particular flu virus has not been able to be transmitted from person to person in a sustained or rapid way, which is the good news.
Q: What does the public health department do when you hear of a new outbreak?
A: We actually conduct influenza surveillance through a variety of mechanisms year-round. We conduct surveillance for the actual flu viruses, for outpatient illness, for influenza hospitalizations, for influenza deaths. This is how we gain situational awareness about flu anywhere in the world. With something like (the new avian flu), we enhance the surveillance systems. We are on the lookout for individuals who now may have an appropriate travel history to areas of the world where this novel virus is circulating, so we can rapidly detect and contain it here. The foundation of any disease-containment strategy is really disease surveillance, finding out what's going on, where the virus is located, how it's spreading. In this situation, certainly, it's imperative to keep an eye out for ill travelers.
Q: You mean you monitor people traveling from China?
A: The CDC is responsible for a lot of that from the federal level, and has worked very closely with the airline industries and sent out travel alerts to the airlines and put notices in airports. We have a very close relationship with the federal CDC quarantine station at Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport. We deal with ill individuals on planes a lot in trying to assess whether they represent a risk of a communicable disease being transmitted or not.
Q: Are we well prepared locally to address a pandemic?
A: Influenza pandemic preparedness has been ongoing for many years here in Georgia and across the nation. We gained a lot of practical experience from the 2009 H1N1 pandemic. You learn as you go, (but) as much as we prepare, it all can change based on the epidemiology of the virus itself. Is it infecting the young? Is it infecting the old? We really have to rely on surveillance to guide a lot of our mitigation decisions. These are new viruses. They essentially have to build and manufacture vaccines on the fly while the outbreak is ongoing. Very often, the vaccine is not available for months at a time, and when it becomes available, at first there may not be enough for everyone at risk. So it's really important to use disease surveillance and epidemiology to guide prioritization of vaccines.
