NEW YORK — White House advisers project that swine flu will sicken up to half the U.S. population, hospitalize up to 1.8 million patients and potentially cause as many as 90,000 deaths this year, more than twice the number killed in a typical seasonal flu.
In a report by the President's Council of Advisers on Science and Technology, President Barack Obama on Monday was urged to speed vaccine production and name a senior member of the White House staff, preferably the homeland security adviser, to take responsibility for decision making on the pandemic. Initial doses should be accelerated to mid-September to vaccinate as many as 40 million people, the advisory group said.
According to what the advisory report describes as a "plausible scenario," 30 percent to 50 percent of the country's population will be infected in the fall and winter. As many as 300,000 patients may be treated in hospital intensive care units, filling 50 percent to 100 percent of the available beds, and 30,000 to 90,000 people may die, the report said.
Peter Gross, chief medical officer at University Medical Center in Hackensack, N.J., said that if the group's scenario comes true,"I think every hospital in America is going to be in a crunch. We'll be hard-pressed to deal with those predictions," he said.
But the predictions seem "overblown," Gross said, given that swine-flu outbreaks in 1968 and 1957 failed to cause as many deaths, even with medical technology and disease surveillance less advanced than today.
"Influenza, you can make all the predictions you want, but it's more difficult than predicting the weather," Gross said in a telephone interview Monday, after the advisory report was made public. "If influenza was a stock, I wouldn't touch it."
Seasonal flu usually kills about 36,000 Americans, said Tom Skinner, a spokesman for the U.S.Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Swine flu, also called H1N1, causes more severe illness needing hospitalization among younger people than seasonal flu, while leaving people 65 and older relatively unscathed, said Mike Shaw of the CDC.
"This isn't the flu that we're used to," said Kathleen Sebelius, U.S. Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. "The 2009 H1N1 virus will cause a more serious threat this fall. We won't know until we're in the middle of the flu season how serious the threat is, but because it's a new strain, it's likely to infect more people than usual."
Data from clinical trials to assess the safety and effectiveness of swine flu vaccines will start to become available in mid-September, health officials reported Aug. 21. Full results from the two-dose trials won't be available until mid October.
"We are making every preparation effort assuming a safe and effective vaccine will be available in mid-October," Sebelius said Monday at the CDC's Atlanta offices.
The 775-bed hospital is planning for an outbreak, upping its order of flu medications and discussing where to put patients if the worst occurs, Gross said.
The President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology is chaired by John Holdren, the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology; Eric Lander, the head of the Broad Institute of Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts; and Harold Varmus, the chief executive officer of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York.
The 21-member group of scientists and engineers, created by Congress in 1976, advises the president on policy involving scientific matters.
Information for this article was contributed by Elizabeth Lopatto and Shannon Pettypiece of The Associated Press.
Front Section, Pages 3 on 08/25/2009