(IHT.com)
Updated: 2005-09-17 15:16

As World Health Organization officials repeated warnings about the potential for a deadly bird flu pandemic and President George W. Bush proposed an "international partnership" to combat the disease, wealthier countries around the world are redoubling efforts to purchase an experimental vaccine and antiviral drugs in the hopes of protecting their own citizens from infection.

A Vietnamese poultry seller displays ducks for sale at a wholesale poultry market in Hanoi, Vietnam, August 9, 2005. [Reuters]

"We cannot afford to face the pandemic unprepared," said Lee Jong Wook, director of the WHO, at the United Nations on Thursday.

The UN agency and the European Union have been urging countries for months to prepare for the possibility of a future human pandemic caused by the bird flu virus, even as they have acknowledged that there is no current risk: The virus, A(H5N1), which has killed millions of birds, only rarely infects humans and does not normally spread from person to person - a basic requirement for human epidemics.

But scientists are worried that it could someday acquire that ability through one of several biological processes. Faced with the unprecedented damage caused by Hurricane Katrina, calls for better disaster planning against disease seem to have taken on new urgency.

This week, the United States announced that it had placed an order for $100 million worth of a promising but still technically unlicensed vaccine that is under development by the French drug maker Sanofi-Aventis.

Italy announced that it had contracted to order 35 million doses of vaccine and other medicines.

Roche Pharmaceuticals was struggling to fill huge recent orders from 30 jurisdictions for antiviral drugs, said Martina Rupp, a spokeswoman for the company, based in Basel, Switzerland. These include Australia, France, England, Singapore and South Korea, as well as Hong Kong.

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