Safety of Swine Flu Vaccine to Face Toug...(profile. A more complete answer is t...),Health

A more complete answer is that the public health system has come a long way since 1976 and should be able to head off or at least detect and interrupt such problems, experts said.

The situation today is already very different from that seen three decades ago. Take health officials' ability to monitor the spread of a disease and pick up on adverse events, for example.

"The Department of Health and Human Services has a number of things in place that will be used to catch early signals if there's any kind of issue and to monitor the safety of vaccinations as they're performed," said Dr. John Treanor, professor of medicine and of microbiology and immunology at the University of Rochester Medical Center, in New York.

Experts also pointed to more sophisticated detection, connectivity and surveillance systems worldwide that are able to monitor changes on an hourly basis.

That should mean that governments are better able now than in 1976 to quickly switch gears as new information emerges.

"The biggest policy error in 1976 was rolling everything up into a single go-no-go decision early in the year," Fineberg said. "That problem has already been averted. Decision-makers and policy-makers are taking it one step at a time, keeping everyone informed. They have avoided that error."

He added: "The second problem [in 1976] was more a strategy problem. They failed to ever think about times when they could reconsider. I think that is something the current crew has avoided by making clear that they are thinking about on-ramps and off-ramps and trying to identify exactly what would go into those decisions. That is an ongoing process."

Rather than using 1976 as an example of public health strategy gone awry, expert suggest looking at the 2003 response to SARS as a public health success story. That outbreak, which emerged in Asia, was detected and contained in relatively short order, although not
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