WHO plays down bird flu warning

The World Health Organisation has moved to play down a cataclysmic warning by one of its own officials that a pandemic caused by the bird flu virus ravaging poultry flocks in the Far East could kill as many as 150 million people.

The prediction came from David Nabarro, a senior WHO expert on infectious diseases, who was appointed on Thursday as UN co-ordinator for avian and human influenza.

He warned that the next pandemic could claim from five million up to 150 million lives.

Dr Nabarro called on political leaders to take immediate action to halt a human pandemic, and said that the higher death figure could result if governments failed to act now.

A WHO spokesman at the agency's Geneva headquarters made a surprise appearance yesterday at the UN regular media briefing in an effort to put Nabarro's comments in context.

While he did not say the 150 million prediction was wrong, or even implausible, he said it was impossible to estimate how many could die.

But he re-iterated the WHO calculation that countries should prepare for 7.4 million deaths globally, arguing that was "the most reasoned position." Scientists have made all sorts of predictions, ranging from less than 2 million to 360 million.

Others have quoted 150 million. Last year, WHO's chief for the Asia-Pacific region predicted 100 million deaths, but until now that was the highest figure publicly mentioned by a WHO official.

Bird flu has been sweeping through poultry flocks and wild birds in Asia since 2003, killing millions, and has infected over 100 humans of whom more than 60 have died.

This has proved that the strain of avian flu circulating in the Far East - H5N1 - is lethal to humans, with a death rate of over 50 per cent.

The fear is that the virus may mutate so that it becomes easily transmissible from human to human, triggering a lethal pandemic that would spread around the world.

Ordinary winter flu, which causes outbreaks in Britain and elsewhere each year, is one of the most infectious diseases known, and spreads rapidly among populations.

If avian flu were to acquire the same level of infectivity, nothing would halt its spread around the globe.

WHO officials say the only hope of halting the next pandemic would be to snuff it out at the start by detecting an outbreak early and treating the 20,000 people closest to the centre of the outbreak to prevent its spread.

It is stockpiling three million doses of anti-viral drugs to be flown to any part of the world to be used in that eventuality.

- INDEPENDENT