By IPS Correspondents
BEIJING , Oct 24 2005 (IPS)

China, once accused of concealing the spread of SARS epidemic, has pledged to close it borders should any case of human-to-human transmission of bird flu be found inside the country.

The menace of a bird flu pandemic that could be blamed on China has provoked a bold statement from a top Chinese health official that Beijing would prefer a slump in its trade rather than risk aiding a global pandemic.

Saving lives would be Beijing’s main priority even if it meant a slowdown in the economy, Huang Jiefu, a Vice-Minister in the Ministry of Health, was quoted as saying by the state news agency Xinhua. He said the country will close its borders if there is even one confirmed case of human-to-human transmission of bird flu.

The warning comes in stark contrast to Beijing’s angry reaction in 2003 to an editorial in the Wall Street Journal suggesting a blockade of the country because of its attempts to conceal the SARS epidemic and failure to deal with it promptly.

”To prevent any possible hazard, we would rather slow down our economy a bit, or let the people encounter some inconvenience,” Huang told health specialists from mainland China, Hong Kong and Macao on the weekend. ”We set our citizens’ lives as our first priority.”

His pledge came as finance specialists predicted that a flu pandemic could devastate Asian economies. The Asian Development Bank said a mild outbreak would cost the region up to 110 billion US dollars in reduced consumption,investment and trade, while a more severe outbreak could lead to global recession.

The first known case of the A (H5N1) strain of avian influenza was found in 1996 in a goose in China. After breaking out in 2003, the deadly flu has killed 61 people in four Asian countries and led to the death or culling of millions of birds. Despite the culls, the lethal influenza had continued its march westwards towards Russia, Eastern Europe and has reached Britain.

A flu pandemic would be triggered if the H5N1 strain mutated into a form that could jump from human to human, possibly merging with human flu to cause a ‘super bug’ against which there may be no antidote, or insufficient supplies of medicines to counter its spread.

The World Health Organization (WHO) believes a bird flu pandemic could result in human deaths ranging from 2 million to 150 million globally.

With the disease spreading west from Asia to Europe, Taiwan said it will override patents and go into emergency production of the antiviral drug Tamiflu, which can alleviate the symptoms of avian flu. Avian flu in the island was discovered in a container of poultry being smuggled from mainland China last week.

The head of Taiwan’s Department of Health, Hou Sheng-Mao was quoted as saying he hoped negotiations with the Tamiflu’s manufacturers and patent-holders, the Swiss pharmaceutical giant Roche AG, would bear fruit but warned that if they failed, Taiwan would press ahead with producing a generic version of the drug.

The WHO has said that the H5N1 strain is endemic to poultry in China and migratory birds across Asia, which means it could be only a matter of time before the virus develops the ability to jump from human to human.

Though no human cases of bird flu have been reported in China, the sheer size of the country’s human and poultry population makes it possible that the mutation might happen here. Besides being the world’s most populous nation, China is also the world’s biggest producer of poultry, which official statistics put at 13 billion farm birds.

Last week China reported its first outbreak of bird flu in more than two months. More than 2,600 chickens and ducks were killed by the H5N1 strain on a farm in Hohhot, Inner Mongolia, prompting the slaughter of a further 90,000 birds.

Chinese top leaders, including premier Wen Jiabao, have repeatedly called for increased vigilance and transparency in detecting and reporting cases of bird flu. But concerns about the occurrence of human pandemic are rising because of China’s segmented system of dealing with the disease.

The Ministry of Agriculture usually handles epidemics found in the poultry while human epidemics are dealt with by the Ministry of Health. It is not until there is an indication that transmission to humans had occurred that the Ministry of Health can step in and investigate the disease, according to Yang Gonghuan, vice-director of China Centre for Disease Prevention and Control.

China promised only a week ago that a joint mechanism of the two ministries would be finally set up to control the spread of the disease more effectively but there remain doubts about the speed and power of authority of the new body.

“It is absolutely crucial that we have a wholesome system of detecting the flu from the birds where it originated down the chain and passing swiftly the information among related ministries,” Deng Jinwen, an official with the Central Communist Party School, was quoted by the Beijing News on Monday.

Apart from bureaucratic hurdles in curbing the disease, Chinese health authorities are facing other obstacles as well. They have been investigating charges that amantadine, an antiviral drug meant for humans, was put in the drinking water of millions of Chinese chickens in the late 1990, rendering most anti-viral defences useless as the virus mutated to a more virulent strain.

China’s Ministry of Agriculture has denied the practice but health experts have warned that the mutated strain of bird flu is now resistant to amantadine. Cases of the more virulent strain have been detected in Vietnam, Thailand and even Europe.

Excerpt: