french experts reduce possible bird flu death toll

French experts reduce possible bird flu death toll

Tue Dec 20, 2005 1:16 PM EST

PARIS (Reuters) - The arrival of a bird flu pandemic in France might cause up to 80,000 deaths, a third less than what was estimated in an initial governmental study released in January 2004, a spokeswoman from France's Health Watch Institute (INVS) said on Tuesday.

"The reduction is due to the current level of anti-viral treatments acquired by the French government," Isabelle Bonmarin, epidemiologist at the INVS told a bird flu conference, organized by the French High Civil Defense Committee.

"With the stockpiles of anti-viral drugs that we have built, we have enough to treat everyone if 25 percent of the population catches the disease," she said.

"In the original study, we had come up with a figure of 118,500 deaths, but that was a scenario based on no health interventions made," she added.

An official from the Health Ministry said that France's anti-viral stock piles had now reached 14.6 million treatments with that figure expected to rise to 30 million by September 2006.

"Around one billion surgical masks have been ordered and we expect it will take about a year for those to be delivered," he told Reuters on the conference sidelines.

France currently owns 50 million protective masks.

Bonmarin said that the death toll caused by a bird flu pandemic could even be lower than 80,000 as people cured with anti-viral drugs would be able to spread the disease during a shorter time span.

"Also our study doesn't take into account the impact that protective measures would have such as quarantine procedures or face masks," she added.

The H5N1 virus remains primarily a virus of birds but experts fear the virus could mutate to spread easily among humans and spark a global epidemic.

So far the virus has killed 71 people in Asia and millions of birds have been culled.

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