Congress Protects Pork

Coffee Brown, MD, University of New Mexico, Talk Radio News

Please don’t call it “swine flu” anymore.

That was the main message at the Senate Appropriations Committee Agriculture, Rural Development, Food and Drug Administration and Related Agencies Subcommittee hearing on the 2009 H1N1 virus.

Witnesses, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack and Dr. Joshua Sharfstein, acting Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, answered
questions from Sens. Herb Kohl (D-Wis.), Sam Brownback (R-Kan.), Robert Bennett (R-Utah) and Mark Pryor (D-Ariz.) about the commercially regrettable naming of the 2009 H1N1 virus and about vaccines.

Vilsack said the USDA has been aggressively campaigning with trading partners to protect pork’s image as a safe food, but China and Russia
have suspended purchases of American pork. Prices have fallen about 20 percent, he said, versus about 45 percent during the 1976 swine flu
scare.

Brownback asked whether there should be more surveillance of animals, since several recent infections have been zoonotic, or transmitted from
animals to humans. Vilsack said that such surveillance is ongoing but that funding has been flat. He stressed that while the last round of bird flu was from birds to humans, this flu has so far only gone from humans to animals. “We should really be calling this the human flu,” he said.

Kohl wanted to know if vaccines would be ready for a possible reoccurrence of the current atypical flu in the fall, and mentioned previous estimates at similar hearings of four to six months to prepare such a vaccine. Sharfstein responded by emphasizing the uncertainties: time to develop the vaccine, time to test it, and the final decision whether full production was merited. He said that full production would not significantly reduce production of the usual seasonal vaccine, as that version will have almost finished the year’s order by the time a decision has to be made.

Kohl asked Sharfstein whether this strain would prove to be dangerous, and Sharfstein replied that it doesn’t look bad now, but viruses mutate, so he couldn’t make predictions about future behavior.