HEALTH: Activists Question True Magnitude of Bird Flu Threat

By Gustavo Capdevila Reprint | | Print |

Gustavo Capdevila

GENEVA, May 20 2005 (IPS) - While a new World Health Organisation (WHO) report has sparked fears of a worldwide bird flu pandemic, civil society activists charge that these worries have been blown out of proportion.

At the launch of the report in Geneva on Thursday, Klaus Stohr, the WHO global influenza programme director, said there is evidence that the virus that causes bird flu is changing, particularly in terms of the way it interacts with humans, and this has raised concerns.

“The pattern of events we have been seeing in the last 18 months has led to an incremental increase in our concern,” said Stohr, pointing to the developments seen over this period: the transmission of the virus to humans and other mammals, and its spread to more countries.

“The trend is going in a certain direction and the recent findings are certainly not going to alleviate our concern,” he added.

According to the new WHO report, the increase in human bird flu cases in Vietnam this year suggests that the virus may be mutating in ways that make the possibility of person-to-person transmission more likely.

While it has yet to be proven that human-to-human transmission has actually occurred, “the pattern of disease appeared to have changed in a manner consistent with this possibility,” the report states.

This has led to fears that the virus could potentially gain the ability to be transmitted among humans more efficiently and develop into a pandemic, killing millions of people around the world.

But Satya Sivaraman of the People’s Health Movement (PHM) told IPS that the climate of “panic” surrounding the disease is largely unsubstantiated, and that a much more balanced position needs to be taken.

The PHM, a coalition of grassroots organisations dedicated to changing the prevailing health care delivery system, is organising the Second People’s Health Assembly, scheduled for Jul. 17-22 in Cuenca, Ecuador.

Stohr admitted that “The most difficult thing to predict is the future and with this virus we have had many, many surprises. The only thing that we are seeing is that it is changing very rapidly.”

“We don’t know whether the pandemic will occur next week or next year, or perhaps another virus is going to cause the pandemic,” he added.

For his part, Guenael Rodier, director of Communicable Disease Surveillance and Response at WHO, noted that it was still impossible to reach conclusions about the potential for possible changes in the epidemiology of the virus.

“The conclusions are in the grey zone. It’s not black and white. With the elements available, there is no evidence in any direction,” he said.

Sivaraman believes that the “chicken flu scare” is very similar to the panic sparked by the previous outbreak in Asia of SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome).

In both cases, he noted, “these are obviously very dangerous and little understood disease outbreaks.” Nevertheless, he added, they are highly localised, and it is not clear whether they can actually spread across the world as rapidly as some fear.

Comparisons have been drawn between these two outbreaks and the Spanish flu, which spread around the world in 1918, killing roughly 40 million people, Sivaraman said.

“That was in the pre-globalisation era, when nobody was travelling much,” he pointed out. “They keep referring to these outbreaks as another Spanish flu, and that’s where all the panic comes from.”

But the PHM activist believes that the fear raised around these diseases is dubious in many ways.

Sivaraman is attending the World Health Assembly, meeting in Geneva until May 25, where one of the items on the agenda is a draft revision of the WHO International Health Regulations aimed at heightening security against the international spread of disease, essentially in response to the SARS and bird flu outbreaks.

While he believes that revising the regulations is a good idea, he fears that the reaction to these diseases is closely linked to “American paranoia about biological terrorism.”

Since the early 1990s, he said, the United States has been trying to convince the world that biological terrorism is possible, but “nobody was listening to them.”

But then, with the outbreak of anthrax, followed by SARS and the chicken flu, they have finally succeeded in “creating this mood.”

One of the implications of this situation is a restriction of the movement of people, he said. “Talk with any doctor in Europe, and they will tell you that tuberculosis is back in Europe because of migrants, that HIV is spreading because of migrants. This is all linked between migrants and diseases.”

Sivaram accused WHO of “playing along” with this campaign because of the money involved, in the form of significant U.S. funding for projects in this area.

He also highlighted the negative role played by the media in sensationalising outbreaks of these diseases. One of the most typical practices is to raise alarm by reporting that the viruses that cause SARS or bird flu are about to mutate.

“But the thing is, viruses mutate all the time. Normally, last year’s influenza is not the same as this year’s influenza. And by the way, influenza kills 26,000 people in the United States alone every year, with all the vaccines, with all the public health precautions. And SARS today has not killed more than 800 people, in something like five or six years,” he commented.

In Vietnam, the country hit hardest by bird flu, 49 people have been infected with the disease since December, of whom 17 have died. The most recent death was reported by WHO on Apr. 17.

In all of the countries where outbreaks have occurred – Vietnam, Thailand and Cambodia – a total of 97 cases have been reported since January 2004, with a death toll of 53 so far.

Of these totals, 76 of the infections and 37 of the deaths were registered in Vietnam, while Thailand accounted for 17 cases and 12 deaths.