University of California plans for avian flu

Campus to Form Task Force on Flu Readiness
BY Matthew Koh
Contributing Writer
Thursday, September 21, 2006


UC Berkeley established a Pandemic Flu Preparedness Task Force earlier this week to assess campus preparedness for a pandemic flu outbreak.

The establishment of the task force, which will be chaired by Dr. Peter Dietrich, the medical director of University Health Services, comes as one of many responses within the UC system to stop the potential spread of Avian flu and other types of influenza.

The task force will have its first meeting in October to outline its responsibilities and the planning process it will undertake in the coming months.

The group will work closely with the campus Center for Infectious Disease Preparedness, the Office of Emergency Preparedness and other campus groups to prepare a comprehensive plan to deal with a possible pandemic flu outbreak.

"The task force is meant to review the operational readiness of the campus," Dietrich said. "(What we will be) thinking about is what the critical processes, procedures and functions are, how to deal with staff out due to infection and the need to protect our student population."

Dietrich said the goal is to have a complete plan of action finalized by April 2007, but added that an outbreak before that time would cause their efforts to accelerate significantly.

"We certainly don't want to engender any fear in people, but we still need to be responsible to prepare for a larger scale epidemic," Dietrich said. "Our hope is that it's a reassuring message to people that there are plans going on."

A number of projects have been under way at nearly all UC campuses within the last year to research potential treatments for not only the avian flu, but other types of influenza strains as well, according to a statement released by the university in January.

The UCLA Center for Vaccine Research was already in the process of clinically testing bird flu vaccines at the beginning of this year, according the statement.

According to Dietrich, it is hard to say exactly what the result of a pandemic flu outbreak would be as the response would depend on the severity of the outbreak.

However, he said there would at the least be a mobilization of the newly created task force and that they would follow the advice of government health agencies.

"We would link up and work with the recommendations of national and local health agencies to follow their recommendations about treatment, isolation, quarantine, other intervention measures," Dietrich said.

Contact Matthew Koh at mkoh@dailycal.org.