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Washington: A US White House bird flu "implementation plan" sets out detailed plans for closing schools in case of a pandemic, and asks businesses to let employees stay home without sanction, an official familiar with the plan said yesterday. It is also blunt about how little the country can do to defend itself from a pandemic of influenza, giving details of how quarantines and border closures are likely to be futile. The plan lays out 300 "very specific" tasks for each US federal government agency, said the official, who spoke only on the condition that he not be identified. The plan assumes the worst, that if an influenza pandemic begins it will be months, if not years, before the best defence, a vaccine, can be formulated and manufactured.
Meanwhile, society will have to hunker down and let the disease run its course. The plan aims to minimise the damage. The government is assuming that 40 per cent of the work force will be absent at the peak of a pandemic, and it is based on a worst-case scenario in which 1.9 million Americans die from the virus and as many as 30 per cent become infected. President George W. Bush announced the initial plan in November, and asked Congress for $7.1 billion (Dh26.06 billion) to fund it. Congress has approved half that amount, but the Health and Human Services Department has expressed confidence that the rest will come when details about how it will be spent are available. New human infection reported Egypt reported a new human case of the H5N1 strain of avian influenza yesterday, bringing to 13 the total number of Egyptians who have been infected. The health ministry said late on Tuesday that the new case was detected in a 27-year-old woman who was infected by poultry from domestic rearing in the Nile Delta governorate of Menufiya. "The tests carried out by the health ministry have confirmed that it was the H5N1 virus," Abdul Sabur Shahin said, adding that the woman had been hospitalised and was in stable condition. Out of the 12 other human cases that have been reported in Egyptians since mid-March, four were fatal and eight people recovered after being treated with Tamiflu.
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