Chasing The Flu

To do it, Ryan is building an international surveillance system with ministries of health all over the world that he hopes would be able to detect the trigger point of a pandemic, the first signs that the virus has become contagious in humans. The plan calls for medical SWAT teams to be flown to the site, to quarantine the area, and begin administering millions of doses of a drug called Tamiflu, the strongest anti virals available.

"We won't have time, possibly, at the beginning of a pandemic even to get laboratory confirmation. It may take days to get laboratory confirmation," says Dr. Ryan. "We may have to make this judgment on the basis of the existence of a cluster that's spreading quickly. And that signal will be very strong. You'll see the disease extend very quickly from two to four to ten. To 20. To 30, 50, and beyond number of… And when you start to see that mini explosion of cases, we're going to have a very, very short time in which to do something about that. Very short."

How long do scientists have?

"The intervention time will be measured from days to weeks. I think no longer than a month at the extreme," says Dr. Ryan.

Dr. Ryan says if an outbreak isn't stopped or controlled in 30 days, scientists may lose the battle, "and nobody knows whether that can be done."

How good is Dr. Ryan's surveillance system?

"My fear is that there are blind spots. That there are blind spots in our surveillance system at national level. And that creates blind spots globally," he explains.

One of those blind spots is in Cambodia, the poorest of the Southeast Asian countries where the virus is most active. Migratory waterfowl have already infected domestic ducks and chickens, a major source of protein for most the people here. Many of them live in poverty with no access to health care.

So far, the virus has killed four people in Cambodia, all of them thought to have been exposed to the blood or droppings of infected chickens and ducks, which are still slaughtered and sold in open air markets all over the country. And doctors here are as scarce as hens' teeth.

One of them is Dr. Ly Sovann, the Cambodian government's director of disease surveillance -- the man in charge of stopping the avian flu here.

Dr. Sovann says the government is prepared for the event of an outbreak, but says "we are not really good prepare yet."

If there are signs that the disease is spreading among humans, Dr. Sovann's job is to report the first outbreaks to officials in Geneva and wait for international help to arrive. But when 60 Minutes visited Cambodia last month, Dr. Sovann said he had fewer than 150 doses of the antiviral drug Tamiflu for a nation of 13 million people.

Dr. Sovann says there is only one dose per province. "But we need more," he says.

Dr. Sovann and his six member staff work out of a small room on the third floor of the health ministry, where he keeps an emergency supply of biohazard suits piled in his office. The power goes off every night at 7 p.m.

If he's called to a pandemic emergency, he'll have to take a taxi. He is supposed to be in charge of the national reporting system, but there is one office phone for the entire staff.

The national pandemic hotline is his personal cell phone. But when you travel outside the city, you realize it may not matter. In most villages there are no telephones to call Dr. Sovann. And even if there was, Dr. Megge Miller, an Australian who is the World Health Organization's epidemiologist in Cambodia, says there's little awareness of avian flu once you get out to the countryside.

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