Bird Flu: US could restrict travelling
Foreign Desk Report

WASHINGTON—Sustained person-to-person spread of the bird flu or any other super-influenza strain anywhere in the world could prompt the United States to implement travel restrictions or other steps to block a brewing pandemic, say federal plans released Wednesday. If a super-flu begins spreading here, states and cities will have to ration scarce medications and triage panicked patients to prevent them from overwhelming hospitals and spreading infection inside emergency rooms, the plan says.
It provides long-awaited guidance to the front-line local officials urging them to figure out now how they would prevent that — and to practice their own plans to make sure they’ll work. Pandemics, or worldwide outbreaks, strike when the easy-to-mutate influenza virus shifts to a strain that people have never experienced before, something that happened three times in the last century. It’s impossible to predict the toll of the next pandemic, but a bad one could infect up to a third of the population and, depending on its virulence, kill anywhere from 209,000 to 1.9 million Americans, say the Bush administration’s new Pandemic Influenza Plan. The illness will spread fastest among school-aged children, infecting about 40 percent of them, and decline with age, the plan estimates.