Back in 2009, the world faced a pandemic H1N1 flu virus outbreak that prompted an additional U.S. vaccination campaign that year and eventually spurred the President to declare swine flu as a national emergency. Now, with U.S. elections around the corner, voters should know how key candidates plan to address future pandemics and biosecurity threats, and whether elected politicians will fund research on these topics and take scientific findings and recommendations into account when making decisions.
To learn where politicians stand on this issue and 13 others, Scientific American has partnered with ScienceDebate.org and asked the presidential candidates—President Barack Obama and former Gov. Mitt Romney—to address science and technology policy during the campaign. We are also asking key Congressional leaders eight of the 14 questions. For the past few weeks, I have been contacting media contacts at Congress to coax responses. (I can now hum stanzas of all hold music played on these politicians’ phone lines.) I gave the Congressional leaders an August 24 deadline, and as yet only Rep. Henry Waxman’s staff has responded with a promise to answer.
SA health and medicine editor Christine Gorman posted the full set of 14 questions here and examined the first three in detail on a weekly basis. Thus far, we’ve had some great discussion and I now want to know your thoughts on the fourth question:
Question #4 Pandemics and Biosecurity: Recent experiments show how avian flu may become transmissible among mammals. In an era of constant and rapid international travel, what steps should the U.S. take to protect our population from emerging diseases, global pandemics and/or deliberate biological attacks?Recent research on avian flu strain H5N1 showed the virus has pandemic potential because it can fairly easily mutate and could become transmissible from person to person—though natural strains have yet to morph into such a threat. The U.S. National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity initially said in December 2011 that research papers on the virus’s specific mutations should not be published. Only after intense debate did scientists release the work to the public.
Pandemic responses requires level-headedness, but contagion can be unpredictable, so it is important that voters know how politicians plan to prepare for and respond to such potential crises. For instance, the very definition of a pandemic became political during the 2009 H1N1 outbreak. A pandemic is essentially global outbreak—when a pathogen spreads from person to person and there is little or no immunity in the population.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, part of our federal government and thus supported by taxpayer dollars, estimated the disease stuck between 43 million and 89 million people in the U.S., which was 14 to 29 percent of the population at the time.
While the CDC’s plan to deal with emerging disease mostly refers to unintentionally spread pathogens, many of the government’s policies focus on bioterrorism. On July 31, the White House released a....
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2012/08/17/will-the-candidates-tell-us-about-their-policies-on-pandemics-and-biosecurity/
