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President Bush has talked to world leaders about the possibility that deadly bird flu could spread a new pandemic around the world, and says one option to keep it from spreading in the United States would be to use military forces to enforce a quarantine.
"The best way to deal with a pandemic is to isolate it and keep it isolated in the region in which it begins," Bush said during a Tuesday news conference.
Bush's remarks come amid increasing concern by world health leaders that bird flu could mutate and spread around the world, similar to the 1918 Spanish flu that killed more than 40-million people worldwide.
Flu outbreaks kill thousands each year, especially the old and those already sickly. But vaccines and people's immunity keep familiar strains in check.
Sooner or later, doctors say, a new global pandemic will occur when the prevalent flu strain changes enough that people have little immunity. They are especially worried that bird flu, which has been circulating in Asia for two years, could mutate.
More than 100-million birds have died or been killed to prevent flu from spreading. More than 65 people have died, mostly those who have been in close contact with birds. But flu viruses change easily, and scientists fear that bird flu - which seems more deadly than other flu strains - could mutate so that it can spread from person to person. If that happens, it would set the stage for a global pandemic.
"That's when it gets dangerous, when it goes bird-person-person," Bush said Tuesday.
Some scientists hope that if the flu mutates, it might become less virulent. Last week, the World Health Organization said a bird flu epidemic might kill 2-million to 7.4-million people, trying to dampen fears after a U.N. official said it could kill 150-million.
Bush stressed the need for rapid reporting of bird flu cases to WHO, as well as quickly tracing how cases spread. He also referred to a popular book on the 1918 epidemic, The Great Influenza by John M. Barry.
"The people of the country ought to rest assured that we're doing everything we can: We're watching it, we're careful, we're in communications with the world," Bush said. "I'm not predicting an outbreak; I'm just suggesting to you that we better be thinking about it. And we are."
As part of its defense spending bill, the U.S. Senate voted last week to provide almost $4-billion to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for bird flu preparedness.
As President Bush spoke, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., the Senate's only physician, was meeting with Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt and Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, to come up with a comprehensive plan for preparing for a possible outbreak of avian flu, said Frist's spokeswoman Amy Call.
Call said Frist "wants to use bird flu as a case study to make sure we're prepared for all pandemics."
Bush said health leaders need to find ways to boost production of vaccines and flu treatments.
"One of the issues is how do we encourage the manufacturing capacity of the country, and maybe the world, to be prepared to deal with the outbreak of a pandemic," Bush said.
Some scientists have questioned the widespread use of quarantine. Doctors who have studied the 2003 SARS epidemic say that one lesson learned was that broad quarantines of people who had been exposed to SARS, but had not become ill, was expensive and time-consuming, but had little effect on the spread of the disease.
Still, SARS was contained in 2003 after about 8,000 cases worldwide, rather than the millions predicted for bird flu.
"If we had an outbreak somewhere in the United States, do we not then quarantine that part of the country, and how do you then enforce a quarantine?" Bush said. "One option is the use of a military that's able to plan and move."
Times staff writer Lisa Greene contributed to this report, which used information from Times wires.