By Marwaan Macan-Markar
BANGKOK, Feb 1 2005 (IPS)

South-east Asian countries grappling with fresh outbreaks of bird flu are displaying strong faith in the transparency of authorities as the fight against the lethal disease picks up, marking a departure from the secrecy that governments resorted to last year.

This shift, 12 months after the region’s governments were heavily criticised for concealing details of the deadly avian flu, is being welcome by public health bodies.

”The improvement in transparency and reporting by (Vietnam and Thailand) compared with the beginning of the problem this time last year is distinct,” Peter Cordingley, spokesman for the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) Western Pacific Regional Office, told IPS.

”Both countries are carrying out intensive surveillance of both poultry and humans,” he added. ”WHO is pleased with this.”

Such surveillance comes at a time when the two countries currently affected by the H5N1 strain of the virus are striving to limit the number of human fatalities due to avian flu.

Currently, Vietnam is the epicenter of the virus, with 12 people dying from bird flu in January. The most recent victim was a 10 year-old-girl from southern Vietnam. There were 17 deaths caused by the virus last year.

Thailand has been more fortunate, with no addition to the 12 bird-flu related deaths it recorded in 2004.

But health officials worry that this Asian death toll, now standing at 41, may increase in the wake of high chicken consumption that is expected during the annual Chinese New Year festival, which starts on Feb.9.

To thwart it, Vietnamese epidemiologists and doctors launched an intensive drive over the weekend to monitor all suspected bird flu patients. It is expected to cover the 30 provinces and cities in that country where the current outbreak of bird flu has been detected.

For its part, Thailand plans to open seven more laboratories in the country to test patients for bird flu. That would bring to 14 the number of testing centers to detect signs of the virus in patients.

Thai newspapers reported over the weekend that the Livestock Development Department had identified 21 provinces in the country as ”high-risk areas for new outbreaks of bird flu.”

Both agriculture and public health officials are on the edge given the speed at which the lethal virus spread across nearly 10 Asian countries during the cool season last year, resulting in over 100 million chickens being culled or dying due to the disease. The countries affected ranged from Thailand and Vietnam to China and Indonesia.

A second outbreak was detected just before the current cool season arrived in five South-east Asian countries, including Thailand, Vietnam and Malaysia.

Fears of the virus being transmitted from human-to-human have grown with reports of such a probable case occurring in Thailand last year. Public health officials are also studying a probable case of the H5N1 virus being transmitted from one patient to another in Vietnam, at the start of this year.

The report of the spread of bird flu between humans in Thailand was featured in the recent issue of the U.S.-based ‘New England Journal of Medicine.’ It confirmed that two Thai women who died of bird flu last year had got the infection while caring for an 11 year-old girl, who had died few days before.

”Human-to-human transmission can occur if somebody is exposed to a long period of contact with a patient having the virus,” Dr. Kumnuan Ungchusak, director of the Bureau of Epidemiology at Thailand’s Public Health Ministry, told IPS,

Such exposure has to be very close, ”like hugging the patient,” added Dr. Kumnuan, who led the Thai researchers in the study that appeared in the U.S. medical journal. ”Exposure also must be for a long period, more than 12 hours, and also the patient must be critically ill.”

At the same time, medical evidence points to the low survival rate among people who were infected with bird flu from contaminated poultry. Between 70 to 80 percent of those infected with the H5N1 strain of the virus have died, according to available reports.

The WHO has already sounded the alarm about the prospect of a global pandemic – killing millions of people – if the bird flu virus mutates and is passed rapidly between humans.

That is because the human immune system lacks the capacity to combat a potential new virus evolving from bird flu. What is more, the estimated eight vaccines being worked on to inoculate people from the bird flu virus are still far from being made commercially available, say health officials.

The last century offered a grim picture of the devastating impact of influenza pandemics: an estimated 50 million people died worldwide during such a pandemic between 1918-19.

”All countries – first and developing worlds – should prepare for a flu pandemic,” says WHO’s Cordingley. ”We think one is highly likely if the present situation continues to deteriorate.”

This region has to mount a unified effort to prevent such a pandemic, he adds. ”Defences against bird flu in humans and against a pandemic are only as strong as the weakest nation. By that definition, Asia is at risk.”

Excerpt: