# 719
Another warning not to succumb to `bird flu fatigue', this time from down under.
Flu pandemic overdue and inevitable
Monday Apr 30 19:07 AEST
Australia must brace itself for an influenza which can't be prevented, a visiting US official has warned.
Eric Hargan, the US Acting Deputy Secretary of Health and Human Services, said during a speech in Sydney that the world was overdue for a flu pandemic, and Australia must take heed.
"Never before have we been as overdue but under-prepared for a recurring natural disaster as we are now for a pandemic," Mr Hargan told the conservative think tank The Sydney Institute on Monday night.
He described an outbreak as having a `popcorn effect': "a pop here, then there, then several, and soon eruptions all over".
Such an event probably could not be prevented, no nation would be spared, and any community that was relying on a national-level government to offer a life line "will be tragically wrong", he said.
The latest bird flu, known the H5N1 virus, was the biggest and worrying current threat, and its spread to Australian birds was inevitable, Mr Hargan said.
"It has spread over migratory flyways from Southeast Asia to Central Asia, Europe, and the Middle East," he said.
"Given global flyway patterns, it is probably only a matter of time before it appears in Australia and North America."
This strain was particularly problematic because it mimicked the deadly 1918 pandemic virus more closely than others, and had proven a 50 per cent death rate among the 290 people so far infected.
"If the H5N1 strain were to develop into a human-to-human transmissible strain, no one would have immunity," said Mr Hargan, who will be meeting Australian officials to discuss the issue.
"And if it retained its terrible level of mortality, we could be facing a global catastrophe.
"If a pandemic strikes, it will come to the United States. It will come to Australia. It will come to communities all across the world."
