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UN Officials Call for More Efforts Against Possible Bird Flu Pandemic

Posted on: Wednesday, 26 October 2005, 09:01 CDT

UN officials call for more efforts against possible bird flu pandemic

OTTAWA, Oct. 24 (Xinhua) -- UN officials Monday told a gathering of health ministers and politicians from 30 countries that they should do more to contain the outbreak of avian flu and curb the risk at source.

"Our first line of defense should be attacking the problem at the poultry level," Dr. Alejandro Thiermann, adviser to the director general of the Office International Des Epizooties (OIE), told the opening session of the two-day gathering as the avian flu continues to rage.

"So far, it is our opinion, that the international community has drastically underinvested in the veterinary infrastructure required to support this vitally important program."

The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) Director General Jacques Diouf said it makes no sense for governments to spend so much on stockpiled antiviral drugs and medical masks for a human disease that doesn't yet exist, but so little on controlling the animal disease that could be a pandemic's precursor.

"It doesn't look to us quite rational that we would be ready to spend so much money on the second line of defence and then on the first line of the combat field, we're not putting even 100 million dollars, " Diouf said.

He said more money should go to helping poor nations pay farmers for the animals slaughtered. At present, he said, there's no incentive for some farmers to comply with destruction orders, so they hide what's happening.

Dr. David Nabarro, the UN's newly appointed systems coordinator on avian and human influenza, agreed with Diouf that more must be done to try to tamp down levels of the deadly H5N1 avian flu virus, which has raged throughout parts of Asia for the past two years.

"That is where a big part of the effort must go," said Nabarro, who recently toured affected southeast Asian countries. He said he expected a significant part of the meeting's agenda would be taken up with the question of controlling the animal outbreaks.

Diouf suggested it would probably take one billion US dollars in efforts to wrestle under control the highly pathogenic H5N1 virus.

In his speech, Dr. Lee-Jong Wook, director general of the World Health Organization, stressed the importance of a warning system in case the avian flu develops into a flu pandemic.

Good communication will be the key to success or failure. It will be the best way to put populations on guard and help communities act responsibly. Early warning systems must be running in all countries, he said.

"These will warn us so we can quickly dispatch the anti-viral stockpiles and take other public response measures that will stop or limit the spread of infection," said Wook. "All countries need to be able to report cases without a delay, that information has to be quickly produced and shared among the international community."

Gathering representatives from Australia, Brazil, China, France and other European and Asian countries, the conference is tackling four themes: the intersect of animal and human health concerns; the need to build surveillance and scientific capacity in affected countries; risk communications and the development and access to antiviral drugs and vaccines.

Source: Xinhua News Agency - CEIS

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