World not doing enough to fight bird flu say officials

OTTAWA - Fears of a bird flu pandemic among people has seriously hampered efforts to prevent the spread of an outbreak among birds because not enough money is being spent on prevention and surveillance, two leading food health officials said today.

Jacques Diouf, director-general of the Food and Agriculture Organization, said many people seemed more focused on a possible human pandemic than on containing the outbreak among domestic poultry, which started almost two years ago in South-East Asia.

Diouf said the FAO had first raised the alarm about bird flu in late 2003 when the disease was limited to China, Vietnam and Thailand. Since then it has killed around 60 people in the region but has moved, likely via wild birds, to parts of Europe, triggering fears it could mutate and then start spreading rapidly from person to person, killing millions.

"Certainly too much time has gone by and even now we seem to focus more on addressing a possible pandemic which is spread from human to human," Diouf said in an interview.

"It's normal to do that and it's good to be ready should this happen. But for the time being we have 140 million birds killed or dying or have died because of avian influenza, with $10 billion of costs ... and it is still there (in Asia) that we are having contamination to human beings."

Diouf was in Ottawa for the start of a two day conference of health ministers and officials from 30 countries to discuss how ready the world is to fight a human influenza pandemic.

Alejandro Thiermann of the World Organization for Animal Health later backed Diouf, saying the first line of defence had to be dealing with the outbreak among poultry.

Many of the countries most affected are poor and lack the money either for proper surveillance or to pay farmers compensation for animals that need to be culled, he said.

"Much more medium- and long-term strategic and material input is required for countries and regions to be in a sufficiently strong position to avert further damage to industry and global human health," he said.

Another region in European Russia confirmed an outbreak of the deadly H5N1 strain of the virus on Monday and Croatia said it would cull more poultry after finding two dead wild swans.

"If, as we think, migratory birds will be one of the ways by which avian influenza is spreading around the world, we can expect ... the problem in the Near East, in East and West Africa and naturally in North America and South America," said Diouf.

The head of the World Health Organization repeated his gloomy message that it was only a matter of time before the world was struck by a major flu pandemic.

"We currently do not have a vaccine that we know will be fully effective. Nor is there sufficient manufacturing capacity at present," Lee Jong-wook told the Ottawa meeting.

"The world will need to produce billions of doses of a safe vaccine when the time comes. This is a huge challenge ... there are no easy and immediate solutions to these issues."

Diouf said the FAO and the World Organization for Animal Health had developed a detailed $175 million strategy for controlling avian flu in birds. So far the two bodies have only received pledges of aid totaling about $30 million and donors have not yet handed over a single cent.

"It is our opinion that the international community has drastically underinvested in the veterinary infrastructure required to support this vitally important program," said Thiermann.

- REUTERS