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Model from Los Alamos suggest vaccinating children, even with poorly matched vaccine.
Travel restrictions and school closures will do little to stop a pandemic of bird flu from marching across the United States, but they may slow it enough to distribute drugs and vaccines, according to a new study published on Monday.
"It's probably not going to be practical to contain a potential pandemic by merely trying to limit contact between people such as by travel restrictions, quarantine or even closing schools," said Timothy Germann of Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, who worked on the report.
"But we find that these measures are useful in buying time to produce and distribute sufficient quantities of vaccine and antiviral drugs."
Their study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, supports the approach being pursued by the U.S. government and recommended by the World Health Organization for preparing for a possible influenza pandemic.
"Our model suggests that the rapid production and distribution of vaccines, even if poorly matched to circulating strains, could significantly slow disease spread and limit the number ill to less than 10 percent of the population, particularly if children are preferentially vaccinated," the team at the U.S. Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory and the University of Washington wrote.
Catherine Macken of Los Alamos said the computer model used in the study provided a surprising finding -- using a weak vaccine in many people would be better than trying to vaccinate a smaller number of people with a more effective dose.
"If you reduce somewhat the length of time that someone is infective ... you end up getting a significant impact," Macken said in a telephone interview.
"You might be better off vaccinating twice as many people, getting a lower level of protection, but still getting an improvement in susceptibility."
No flu vaccine is perfect and experts have been uncertain which approach would work better.The team at Los Alamos and the University of Washington ran a complex computer simulation of what the spread of bird flu might look like in the United States. They say their findings would hold for any highly mobile society.
"In the event that a pandemic influenza virus does reach the U.S., according to our results, the U.S. population could begin to experience a nation-wide pandemic within 1 month of the earliest introductions," the researchers wrote.
The model assumes that about a third of the population would become infected -- the rate seen in the past two pandemics, in 1957 and 1968.
They included several circumstances for people to meet and potentially pass the virus along, including households, neighborhoods, preschools, playgroups, schools, shops and work.
Travel restrictions and school closures will do little to stop a pandemic of bird flu from marching across the United States, but they may slow it enough to distribute drugs and vaccines, according to a new study published on Monday.
"It's probably not going to be practical to contain a potential pandemic by merely trying to limit contact between people such as by travel restrictions, quarantine or even closing schools," said Timothy Germann of Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, who worked on the report.
"But we find that these measures are useful in buying time to produce and distribute sufficient quantities of vaccine and antiviral drugs."
Their study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, supports the approach being pursued by the U.S. government and recommended by the World Health Organization for preparing for a possible influenza pandemic.
"Our model suggests that the rapid production and distribution of vaccines, even if poorly matched to circulating strains, could significantly slow disease spread and limit the number ill to less than 10 percent of the population, particularly if children are preferentially vaccinated," the team at the U.S. Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory and the University of Washington wrote.
Catherine Macken of Los Alamos said the computer model used in the study provided a surprising finding -- using a weak vaccine in many people would be better than trying to vaccinate a smaller number of people with a more effective dose.
"If you reduce somewhat the length of time that someone is infective ... you end up getting a significant impact," Macken said in a telephone interview.
"You might be better off vaccinating twice as many people, getting a lower level of protection, but still getting an improvement in susceptibility."
No flu vaccine is perfect and experts have been uncertain which approach would work better.The team at Los Alamos and the University of Washington ran a complex computer simulation of what the spread of bird flu might look like in the United States. They say their findings would hold for any highly mobile society.
"In the event that a pandemic influenza virus does reach the U.S., according to our results, the U.S. population could begin to experience a nation-wide pandemic within 1 month of the earliest introductions," the researchers wrote.
The model assumes that about a third of the population would become infected -- the rate seen in the past two pandemics, in 1957 and 1968.
They included several circumstances for people to meet and potentially pass the virus along, including households, neighborhoods, preschools, playgroups, schools, shops and work.
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