ASIA: Gov’ts Pledge to Net Bird Flu with Local, Regional Measures

By Marwaan Macan-Markar Reprint | | Print |

Marwaan Macan-Markar

BANGKOK, Jan 28 2004 (IPS) - Just as China became the 10th Asian country hit by the deadly bird flu, governments from most of the affected countries resolved here Wednesday to contain this fast-spreading virus through a mix of local and regional measures.

At the local level, government officials who participated in a three-and-a-half hour meeting agreed that mass culling of poultry was the best remedy to check the spread of the H5N1 strain of bird flu, which has killed eight people – two in Thailand and six in Vietnam.

”We know that the animal reservoir is the source of the infection. Most important is to remove this reservoir to reduce human contact with it,” Shigeru Omi, director of the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) Western Pacific division, said during a press conference that followed the meeting.

”(Culling) is the bottom line strategy,” added Omi, whose organisation, along with the U.N. Food and Agriculture (FAO) and the World Organisation for Animal Health (known by its French acronym OIE) joined ministers and officials from 10 Asian countries at this international gathering to map out an immediate response to the crisis.

The countries that participated in the meeting were Cambodia, China, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, Laos, Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam, and Thailand, the host of the meeting.

But not all of the governments attending this hurriedly arranged event were in agreement with the policy of mass killings of chickens in epidemic zones.

An Indonesian official revealed, for instance, that Jakarta would stick to a policy that has been criticised in some quarters – the government’s encouraging of individual farmers to cull their infected flock since ”mass culling is difficult for the government”.

According to available reports, close to four million chickens in Indonesia have died from the virus, the first signs of which were detected in November last year. But the Indonesian government, like its Thai counterpart, did not acknowledge such a deadly outbreak until recently.

At the regional level, governments identified key areas to strengthen cooperation. They included joint research and development programmes, sharing best practice initiatives and to support low-cost test kits.

”Daily contact and information exchange” between affected countries will also be pursued, Thai Foreign Minister Surakiart Sathirathai said at the press conference. ”We agreed to consider creating a regional veterinary service and to design bio-security measures.”

In some ways, the language emerging out of these international talks sounded like the commitments made by Asian governments at a meeting in Bangkok last year to quell the spread of another disease – Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS).

That virus, passed from human to human, killed 800 people and infected close to 8,000 others worldwide by mid-2003.

For the moment, however, avian flu has not gone in the direction of human to human infection. The eight people who have died due to the H5N1 virus were infected after having come into contact with poultry struck by the flu.

But this brings little relief to the WHO, since the U.N. health agency remains worried about the possibility that this current strain of the bird flu virus can mutate and combine with a human influenza virus to become a more deadly disease.

Urgent action is needed to ”quickly stop the epidemic and to prevent the avian influenza from mutating, thus making it more virulent,” since it could ”lead to human to human transmission,” the WHO declared in a statement released at the end of the meeting.

The 10 Asian countries with cases of avian flu are Cambodia, China, Indonesia, Japan, Laos, Pakistan, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand and Vietnam.

The pressure the region is under to quell this deadly disease was amplified on the eve of Wednesday’s talks when it was reported that chickens and ducks in four areas of Bangkok were detected with the virus.

Mid-week reports in the local press revealed that the up to 25 provinces out of the country’s 76 provinces had been listed with signs of the avian flu, which means that they could be subject to a state of quarantine.

Word from China only added to the mounting worries. The first case of bird flu in the country’s Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region was confirmed this week.

Three thousand chickens were infected in one farm and in another, 1,300 birds had died out of the 2,000 birds in the poultry farm, said Qi Jingfa, China’s vice minister of agriculture who led his country’s delegation for the Bangkok meeting.

”The local governments have called for the destruction of the infected birds,” he added.

The extent of China’s concern was reflected by the lead taken by Chinese President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao. Not only have they publicly acknowledged the presence of the disease, but have called for a comprehensive response to it,

That is a marked difference from Beijing’s behaviour during last year’s outbreak of SARS. During that health crisis, Chinese officials failed to go public with a report for months, and consequently earned the wrath of the international community.

Beijing’s more open stance this time around should be welcome news to international public health authorities, given how an epidemic in a country as vast as China, where people live in close proximity to poultry farms, could precipitate a global health crisis that the WHO wants to avoid.