By Kevin Robillard, CQ Staff

Two public health experts painted a relatively rosy picture Tuesday of the United States’ ability to respond to the swine flu pandemic, saying the country had learned from earlier mistakes and from plans developed during the avian flu scare several years ago.

“The public health measures that were put in place were quite sensible,” said Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, at a briefing on the H1N1 virus held by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Congressional Global Health Caucus and the Kaiser Family Foundation.

Fauci and Harvey Fineberg, president of the Institute of Medicine, said the United States had learned from the 1976 swine flu scare. Fineberg, who wrote a book about the scare called The Epidemic that Never Was, said a decision to go ahead with nationwide immunizations was made in January 1976, when only a few soldiers at Fort Dix, N.J., had contracted the virus. Even though the disease didn’t spread, 40 million people were still immunized.

Then, Fineberg said, decision makers were “entirely driven by the worst-case” scenario and overreacted to the problem.

“Today, we need to not make the complementary error of only preparing for the most likely case,” he said.

Plans developed for the avian flu, or H5N1, in the middle of this decade should help combat any mass swine flu outbreak, Fauci said. Fortunately, swine flu has proven to be less deadly than its avian cousin, which has killed about half of all those it infects.

Fauci and Fineberg said health officials will need to watch how swine flu spreads and behaves in the southern hemisphere’s winter in order to prepare an appropriate response.

One worry is that the United States won’t be prepared for a mass immunization campaign, if one is necessary. “The real concern is getting organized throughout the country to administer what we need to administer,” Fineberg said.

But there likely won’t be a need for widespread immunizations.

“H1N1 now is acting like a seasonal flu that is out of season,” Fauci said.

But both experts warned predictions about the flu are notoriously difficult to make.

“The thing you can say about influenza that’s predictable is that it’s unpredictable,” Fauci said.