Interesting article in New Yorker

[Guest guest]

The title of the article is " Going viral / The Pentagon takes on a new enemy:

swine flu " . The article is the very interesting historical account of how the

Pentagon reacted to the swine flu pandemic in 2009 and the challenges they

faced. The beginning of the article is available to non-subscribers on line

at:http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/01/31/110131fa_fact_hoffman. If you

have a subscription, you can log in to get the full text. The publicly

available text follows:

ABSTRACT: ANNALS OF SCIENCE about the Pentagon's reaction to the swine flu

virus. On Tuesday night, April 28, 2009, Darrell Galloway, a senior official at

the Pentagon's Defense Threat Reduction Agency, watched a news report from

Mexico City about a new strain of influenza known as swine flu that was

spreading fast. That night, Galloway, a microbiologist, resolved to do something

about it. He was authorized by the military to work on a specific set of

threatening diseases that were considered potential weapons in war or in

terrorism, including anthrax, smallpox, plague, and the Ebola and Marburg

hemorrhagic fevers. Influenza was outside his focus, but the next morning,

Galloway summoned his staff and announced that they were to begin work

immediately on creating a new antiviral drug to combat swine flu. Between 2001

and 2010, Congress approved fifty billion dollars to protect against biological

threats. In 2006, the Pentagon ordered an unusual five-year research initiative

to counter germs being used as weapons of war or terror, and assigned Galloway

to launch it. Instead of targeting pathogens one by one, the initiative would

seek to invent therapeutic drugs and vaccines that could counter multiple germs.

They would also develop new processes that could be used to quickly create drugs

and vaccines to fight previously unknown pathogens. The effort became known as

the Transformational Medical Technologies Initiative (T.M.T.I.). Galloway faced

huge obstacles. Bringing a new drug or vaccine from laboratory to market in the

U.S. can take ten to fifteen years and cost more than a billion dollars. The

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention started preparations for a new

vaccine in April of 2009, right after swine flu entered the U.S., but the White

House was concerned that the vaccine wouldn't be ready in time for a pandemic.

Mentions Callahan, a DARPA physician specializing in infectious diseases

and rapid response, who was working simultaneously on a vaccine. Galloway turned

to Ian Lipkin, the director of the Center for Infection and Immunity at the

Mailman School of Public Health, who sequenced the swine-flu virus in thirty-one

hours. In May of 2009, Galloway asked Iversen, a scientist at AVI

BioPharma who specialized in antisense technology, to help T.M.T.I. develop the

drug. Animal testing showed that Iversen's antisense compound dramatically

lowered levels of swine flu in infected ferrets. By April 2010, swine-flu virus

had infected between fifteen and thirty per cent of people in the U.S., but it

was not as lethal as many officials had feared it would be. As a result, neither

Galloway nor Callahan got the call to start mass production. Yet when the Obama

Administration unveiled a new strategy for responding faster and more

effectively to bioterrorism, in August, it called for many of the innovations

and goals that Galloway had set for T.M.T.I. The Defense Department decided to

make T.M.T.I. a permanent program, and the Pentagon issued a formal order that

emerging infectious diseases are a proper target for military research.