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HEALTH-BURMA: Bird-Flu Awareness Campaigns Show Results

Marwaan Macan-Markar

BANGKOK, Jan 3 2008 (IPS) - An outbreak of bird flu virus among poultry in Burma’s eastern Shan State, close to the Thai border, is being greeted with a mix of concern and relief.

The cause for relief stems from the flow of information in the military-ruled country that triggered the alarm following the death of nearly 1,000 chickens, 20 ducks and a few geese infected by the H5N1 strain of the virus in late December. Farmers in the affected areas notified local animal and public health authorities as soon as they spotted dead birds in their backyards.

‘’That was a good sign. It is very important for local communities to act this way if we are to curb the spread of avian influenza (AI),’’ says Wantanee Kalpravidh, regional coordinator for the AI project in Asia for the Asia and Pacific regional office of the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO). ‘’Farmers who have backyard poultry have to be part of the solution.’’

Such a lead taken by the farmers follows the education and awareness campaigns that have been conducted in Burma, which is also known as Myanmar. U.N. agencies like the FAO and the staff of the South-east Asian nation’s animal and public health departments are among those heading this information campaign. ‘’There have been extensive education and awareness programmes that have targeted farmers,’’ Wantanee told IPS. ‘’It is gradually making a difference, like the recent case in the Shan State, where the farmers were the first to report the AI outbreak.’’

The Shan State, in fact, has been the focus of such education campaigns. After all, it is where AI outbreaks have been documented by the Burma’s livestock breeding and veterinary department on at least two occasions – in October and November 2007- prior to the recent outbreak, in late December.

In the first week of December, there were two training programmes, with one attracting some 800 participants, a sizeable number of who were farmers, according to the FAO. These sessions, conducted in local languages, included information on how infected poultry could be identified, what should be done if the largely backyard chickens start dying, how people should protect themselves and which authorities should be notified.

This attempt by Burma’s junta to permit the public to be involved in curtailing the spread of AI stands in contrast to the initial response of the military leaders when the deadly virus first reared its head in March 2006 near the central city of Mandalay. Burma’s citizens were denied information in the local state-owned media for the first four days after the outbreak.

But as recent reports from Vietnam reveal, AI continues to be a formidable threat even in countries that have won praise for mounting education and awareness campaigns that have been in place for a longer period and over a wider area than Burma. In late December, two farms in southern Vietnam were hit by bird flu, leading to the slaughter of hundreds of geese, according to the animal health department.

Vietnam was one of the South-east Asian nations badly affected by AI when the current outbreak began in the winter of 2003. By the end of 2005, 42 of its people had had died out of 93 who had been infected by the virus. In addition, some 44 million birds, nearly 17 percent of the country’s poultry population, had died or been slaughtered by December 2005.

But an intensive education, vaccination and culling programme was launched towards the end of 2005 to stall this deadly trend. The drive to change public behaviour also forced the closure of the country’s ubiquitous wet markets, where live or freshly killed chickens are sold. And it paid off during most of 2006, with the country not having a single reported case of AI among poultry.

However, last year saw Vietnam battling AI outbreaks from the beginning of 2007. The largest slice of the dead birds were free-range ducks, which had been frequently described as ‘’silent carriers’’ of the H5N1 strain of the virus by experts, rather than getting quickly infected and dying from the disease like chickens.

The return of the bird flu virus to Vietnam and its continued presence in the worst affected country in the region, Indonesia, confirmed a belief that has worried both animal and public health experts. ‘’In Asia, the virus is actively circulating in some hotspots,’’ the FAO said in a mid-December update about the global trends in AI’s spread.

Over 60 countries in Asia, Europe and Africa have been affected by H5N1 since the beginning of the epidemic in animals in the winter of 2003, it added. ‘’Of these, 28 have experienced outbreaks during 2007, five of them for the first time: Bangladesh, Benin, Ghana, Saudi Arabia and Togo.’’

According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), 215 people have died of disease out of 348 who have been infected since 2003. In 2007, there were 50 fatal cases out of 77 people who fell ill. The fatalities were in Cambodia, China, Egypt, Indonesia, Laos, Nigeria and Vietnam. Indonesia has seen 94 people die out of 116 reported cases since 2004.

In November last year, Burma recorded its first human case of bird flu, a seven-year-old girl from a village in the Shan State. She was infected following an outbreak of AI among the poultry in her village.

Public health experts fear that the H5N1 strain of the virus could mutate into a flu that could be easily passed between humans, triggering a global pandemic that could kill millions. This fear is rooted in the fact that the human immune system lacks the strength to fight infections caused by the H5N1 strain of the AI virus.