Steve Kuo (郭旭崧), the director of the Center for Disease Control (CDC), returned from a WHO bird flu conference held in Geneva yesterday and said that the large scale precautionary measures that Taiwan has been taking against avian flu over the last few months are not an overreaction.
"If anything, many countries believe that they are not well enough prepared," he said.
Kuo said that most countries were placing the focus of their defense strategies on making a vaccine.
"However, making a vaccine won't be that easy. By the time there is a case of person-to-person transmission the virus will have mutated," he said.
He said that to successfully produce a vaccine, it would first be necessary to obtain the virus seed of the strain found in person-to-person transmission, with the critical point being "early detection" of the first case of human-to-human transmission.
Once the WHO have the virus seed, they could then distribute it to appropriate countries with the capacity and capability to produce a vaccine.
On the Tamiflu front, he said that some nations had expressed doubts over whether Taiwan could make a generic version of the drug -- which has proven effective against the flu, but that he was confident that Taiwan could do so.
He added that the WHO planned to hold regional bird-flu drills around the world and that Taiwan hoped to be a participant.
Kuo said the government sought to protect all those living in Taiwan, including the 400,000 or so foreigners in the country, and that when and if a call center for an avian-flu pandemic became necessary, there would be an English-speaking service available.
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