By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Editor ORLANDO, Fla., Feb 6 (Reuters) - Memories of the 2001 anthrax attacks and planning mistakes haunt Dr. Julie Gerberding as she urges government and private companies to prepare for a potential bird flu pandemic. Gerberding, now director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, has been among the leading experts warning of the threat of H5N1 avian influenza. She is afraid that, because it has not yet produced a feared pandemic, people will stop preparing for one. And one is coming, of that she is sure -- if not caused by H5N1, then most certainly by something else. "Why are we complacent? Obviously, we live in an environment where people have a short attention span," Gerberding told a pandemic flu conference in Orlando. Recent events have revived some interest. An unexpected outbreak of the H5N1 virus at a British turkey farm last week has frightened European poultry producers. It continues to kill the occasional person -- 166 by the latest World Health Organization count, including recent cases in Indonesia, Nigeria and Egypt. With just a few mutations, it could spread globally, killing millions and devastating economies. And the world is nowhere near ready, Gerberding told the Business Preparedness for Pandemic Influenza meeting sponsored by the University of Minnesota's Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy. Gerberding, who joined CDC in 1998 and became director in 2002, reviewed the center's handling of the 2001 anthrax attacks, in which five people died out of 22 infected after someone mailed letters containing finely milled anthrax spores. Even CDC, which had been preparing for a possible biological attack, made some wrong guesses, she said. CHALLENGING ASSUMPTIONS "In the heat of the moment we didn't challenge our dogma," Gerberding said. "One of the most glaring dogmas was that postal workers were not at risk when in fact they were very much at risk." CDC assumed the spores could not get out of sealed envelopes, but they did, and two Washington, D.C., postal workers died. CDC had to coordinate with a variety of other agencies, and things did not always go smoothly. "We must learn about better ways to coordinate and collaborate," Gerberding said. And even though the culprit or culprits were never caught, few people are thinking about anthrax now, she said."That's dangerous. That's very, very dangerous," Gerberding said. "I know that is the same attitude we are facing in some areas with pandemic flu." The CDC ultimately processed 250,000 samples in testing for how far the anthrax spores were spread by the postal system in 2001. "No one planned for this. There was no surge in the system," she said. "This was 200 people and a handful of letters -- nothing on the scope of a pandemic." "It is very hard to get people to take the action they need. That is true of organizations and is certainly true of business and government," Gerberding said. CDC and the Health and Human Services Department released new plans last week for coping with a pandemic, which called for closing schools and other "social distancing" measures to keep an infectious virus from spreading. "We recognize that ultimately, the only solution to a flu pandemic is a vaccine," Gerberding said. "We are still years away from having a scalable vaccine supply that we can rely on in the early phases of pandemic." That means only a few people could be vaccinated -- even after a six-month wait to develop a vaccine in the first place.
