Health Care

HEALTH CARE -- (House of Representatives - November 07, 2005)

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Mr. BURGESS. Madam Speaker, I thank the gentleman for bringing this topic to the floor tonight and for including me in the discussion.

In the Spanish flu outbreak in 1918, one of the observations was, instead of the very young, the very old and the infirm who were the victims of this illness. It was, in fact, young people age 28 to 45 who appeared to be the primary victims of this illness.

Undoubtedly, part of that is related to the fact that we do not have any underlying immunity to this disease and people who are, as a general rule, exposed to a lot of other people, that is, people in school, people in the workplace, in other words, your 20- to 45-year-old age group, would have a greater chance to come down to exposure to this virus, which was very virulent, had a high ineffectivity rate, and simply a cough in the room was enough to expose someone to the virus; and, again, with no native immunity, it could overwhelm their system fairly quickly.

There is no question it is still a deadly virus to the very young. It is still a deadly virus to the very old, but I think one of the striking epidemiological features of the 1918 flu was that people who were generally regarded as being in good health also seemed to fall victim to this illness.

Also bear in mind, we were in the last months of the First World War so there were a lot of recruits who were stationed together in barracks and tents, and the virus seemed to be particularly virulent in its outbreaks in those types of situations.

So some differences from 1918 to now and certainly our ability to know about an outbreak. Syndromic surveillance will be an important part of the pandemic plan that the Secretary has unveiled.

The other important concept, since this disease is so widespread, about a quarter of the globe right now is affected with the bird flu. Because the geographic footprint is so large and because birds can fly from place to place and people travel from place to place so easily, an outbreak anywhere has to be regarded as an outbreak everywhere. So if the disease appears to travel easily from person to person in Vietnam, in Indonesia, that means that our full pandemic plan has to come into play in this country.

The gentleman mentioned the experience with SARS, when we first came to Congress in 2003, a deadly, deadly illness that previously was only known in an animal host in China. The transmissibility of SARS was with a little more difficulty than with influenza; that is, you had to get a little closer to the infected person with SARS than with the flu, which meant that health care workers and close household contacts were the types of people who were most at risk.

But bear in mind, we conquered SARS, we beat back SARS without developing a vaccine for the virus and without any specific treatment for the virus. This was accomplished through studies of epidemiology, knowing where the outbreaks were, what travel patterns were and then very careful quarantine of those individuals in whom the disease was suspected and very careful isolation techniques for health care providers when it was suspected they were dealing with a case of that disease. The few times we forgot those principles in dealing with SARS is when the outbreak was allowed to, in fact, reignite or reengage.

Quite different from our current situation. No vaccine for the virus, although the virus was identified by the use of genomics. The virus was identified very quickly, but no vaccine was developed and no effective treatment. With the avian flu, there is a vaccine that is already now available; it has been developed, it is in testing. And, of course, there are antiviral medications that are effective in treating the H5N1 virus. So some differences there between those two.

If I could make one last point, and I did not make it during my previous remarks, and I should have: Although the regular flu shot will provide no protection against the bird flu, we should all still get our regular flu shots and keep the appearance of regular flu to a minimum this year, this flu season, because the fewer people who are sick and the fewer people are who are debilitated by the regular flu virus, I think that will improve our overall odds in keeping the pandemic flu at bay.

I yield back to the gentleman and thank him for his time.

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