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Lack of Funding Hampers Bird-Flu Fight in Asia

Posted on: Monday, 10 October 2005, 12:00 CDT

By Keith Bradsher

In Asia, crucial needs are being left unmet on the front lines of the world's defenses against avian flu, in some cases for lack of a few million dollars, international health officials said over the weekend. When Vietnam began detecting the disease in chickens nearly two years ago, it initially slaughtered and burned every chicken within about five kilometers, or about three miles, of an infected fowl. But farmers, who received little compensation, strongly objected to sacrificing their flocks and sometimes sold their birds instead at roadside markets to unsuspecting drivers.

Yielding to popular pressure, the government has steadily shrunk the culling radius. Officials now kill only those birds in an infected household flock that do not die of the disease by themselves. In Indonesia, a lack of money to compensate farmers for culled chickens prompted the government to announce last year a less- expensive policy of vaccinating chickens. One risk of such a strategy is that the virus will adapt and infect even unvaccinated chickens without causing symptoms of illness. That makes it extremely difficult to keep live, infected chickens from being sold in markets.

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization has been trying since February to raise $100 million from donor countries to pay for veterinary services and diagnostic equipment to assess and slow the spread of avian flu.

The FAO decided at the time not to ask for more money, to compensate farmers for the culling of their flocks, after concluding that donors would not be willing to contribute any more.

The organization has raised barely $30 million, leaving many veterinary needs unmet. The $100 million figure "is what we think is the minimum for what the countries in the region need immediately to contain the virus" and slow its spread, said Diderik de Vleeschauwer, the FAO's spokesman in Bangkok.

He said containing the spread of the disease could reduce the opportunities for the virus to acquire the ability to pass easily from person to person, a requisite for the virus to cause a global pandemic.

More preparations have been made to respond to human cases of avian influenza, as opposed to cases in birds, especially in the past year. Vietnam has a comprehensive plan that covers how government agencies responsible for everything from finance to tourism would respond to an epidemic.

Hong Kong is assembling a database of private doctors willing to do volunteer work in government hospitals in the event of an epidemic.

South Korea is one of several governments in the region that has run an elaborate simulation for how government agencies might respond to a wide outbreak of the disease.

While every government in East Asia and the western Pacific has some kind of a plan, more needs to be done, said Dr. Richard Brown, an epidemiologist with the World Health Organization. Many gaps lie in differences in incomes among Asian countries.

Poor countries like Cambodia and Laos struggle to provide even the most basic health care to people outside their biggest cities. Health officials worry that if the virus were to start spreading in either country, it could get out of control before the international health community even knew of it, quickly spreading across borders. Teams of experts from the WHO, the FAO and other UN agencies are scheduled to visit both countries later this year to assess their needs in fighting a possible pandemic.

Asia's most affluent societies have taken the greatest precautions. Japan has begun manufacturing its own Tamiflu, a costly antiviral medicine that until recently was made only in Europe. In Hong Kong, more than 100 private and government-run clinics, and most nursing homes and child care centers, provide the government with detailed, weekly reports on the number of fever cases and other illnesses, said Dr. Ronald Lam, the principal medical officer for emergency preparedness at the Hong Kong Health Department.

Taiwan was one of the earliest buyers of a national Tamiflu stockpile two years ago. It also set up its own vaccine factory, which will manufacture 200,000 doses of an experimental vaccine created by Taiwanese scientists.

Mainland China's preparedness for fighting avian flu is something of a mystery. The authorities said they had a draft plan to deal with a pandemic, but divulged few details.

Source: International Herald Tribune

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