HEALTH-ASIA: Better Detection Key to Avoiding New Bird Flu Crisis

By Marwaan Macan-Markar Reprint | | Print |

Marwaan Macan-Markar

BANGKOK, Feb 26 2004 (IPS) - If Asia is to avoid another avian flu crisis, the region has to change the current ways that its poultry industry has been expanding and put into place new surveillance systems to detect animal diseases, experts said here Thursday.

Such calls by officials from the World Organisation for Animal Health (known by its French acronym OIE) and U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) come as researchers struggle to unearth the source of the disease and understand its epidemiology.

”Never in the past have we witnessed an avian virus circulating so quickly in such a large part of the world,” Bernard Vallat, head of OIE said in a speech read out on his behalf at the opening of an emergency regional meeting to assess the rampaging flu. ”We got a very aggressive strain of H5N1, with a strong capacity (to) spread.”

The disease has still to be contained, added Hu Changchui, head of FAO’s Asia-Pacific office. ”It may continue to spread, or to re-emerge in the future.”

Besides assessing how the region has coped with avian flu over the past month, the three-day meeting of 22 governments from across Asia and the Pacific is expected to identify the hurdles the region face and prepare a blueprint to surmount these problems.

This challenge before government officials and international agriculture, animal and health experts at the meeting is in fact more acute in the wake of the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) pessimistic forecast.

The conditions in the affected countries ”are ripe” for the emergence of an influenza virus that could be passed from human to human, touching off a pandemic, Dr Bjorn Melgaard, WHO’s representative in Thailand told the meeting.

”If this pandemic virus appears, it will have profound consequences for all people in the region and globally,” he added. ”Pandemic preparedness is one of our priorities, the others being reduction of human exposure, surveillance and research.”

Ten Asian countries have been hit with bird flu, with Vietnam and Thailand being the worst affected due to the human toll. Of the more than 30 people infected by the flu in both countries, 15 have died in Vietnam and seven in Thailand.

For WHO, most worrying is the very high percent – 70 percent – of people infected by bird flu (due to close contact with infected chickens or consuming them) dying from the disease.

The U.N. health agency raised alarm about bird flu’s deadly consequences almost a month ago, warning that millions of people could die if the bird flu mutates into influenza that could passed between humans.

In the wake of that warning about the H5N1 strain of the flu, which was detected for the first time in Hong Kong in 1997, experts have been recalling the lethal flu outbreak in 1918-19, which killed an estimated 50 million people.

Melgaard said, however, that work on developing a human vaccine for avian flu is on schedule. ”A vaccine could be available shortly for vaccine manufacturers to begin small-scale production.”

Since bird flu struck the region, an estimated 100 million chickens have died due to the disease or been slaughtered in mass cullings out of East and South-east Asia’s six billion poultry population, according to the FAO.

Poultry has been a vital source of food and income security for Asia, said Hu, a fact borne out by the fact that the region has some 200 million small farmers who have between 10 to 100 birds in their farms.

For OIE, this kind of environment may have been one factor that fuelled the outbreak of the bird flu. Vallat drew attention to this reality in his speech at Thursday’s meeting.

As a short term measure, OIE urged countries to ”stop the virus at source by killing infected or in-contact animals.” However, it cautioned against countries using available vaccines irrationally.

”The choice of vaccine and its quality are crucial in order to face these issues,” said Vallat.

In the long term, OIE urged governments to establish a surveillance mechanism to ”detect early priority animal diseases” and to ”implement timely control measure before the spread of the pathogens”.

Furthermore, OIE’s Vallat declared that the avian flu has exposed weaknesses in the veterinary service in some Asian countries: ”(They) do not have sufficient skills and resources for animal disease surveillance, early warning information system and the management control methods.”

In order to avoid future outbreaks of the flu, OIE stressed the need to ”involve farmers and private veterinarians in the early detection and notifications of the disease”.

However, the Pesticide Action Network (PAN) for Asia and the Pacific, a non-governmental organisation, commented this week that the avian flu crisis is the result of ”factory farming” of poultry.

It declared in a commentary that ”chicken are often crammed in comparably smaller coops and cages, or long sheds that can house thousands of birds, and outbreaks of infections can easily spread”.

”This is not an isolated development, it is symptomatic of the serious problems we are facing with the way we produce our food,” PAN’s executive director Sarojeni Rengam declared.