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UN Group Would Try to Slow Bird Flu in Humans

Posted on: Sunday, 12 March 2006, 06:00 CST

By Tom Wright

Efforts to contain a human pandemic of bird flu are likely to fail, the World Health Organization said Friday. But experts are moving ahead with a plan for slowing the spread of the virus to buy time and have more vaccine ready for treating people in the event of widespread human-to-human transmission.

After a week of talks by about 70 health experts, agency officials said they planned to create a task force of 100 experts charged with helping countries identify outbreaks and putting in place containment measures. But they noted that scientists still knew little about how the disease was transmitted, making it difficult to anticipate where and when it would strike.

"If we try to contain a pandemic," said Keiji Fukuda, coordinator of the global influenza program at the World Health Organization, "there really is a very good chance we will fail, that we will not be able to stop it."

He added, "However, there is also a very good chance that if we mount this kind of effort, we may slow down the spread of a pandemic virus early on."

The agency, an arm of the United Nations based in Geneva, hopes that its efforts will buy time for health officials and drug companies to develop a vaccine to protect people once a final strain of bird flu emerges in humans. Bird flu has so far infected 174 people, killing 96, mainly rural workers in Southeast Asia who came into close contact with infected poultry or wild birds. Millions of chickens have been culled since 1997 when the H5N1 virus first struck in Hong Kong. The disease re-emerged in 2003, recently spreading to poultry and wild birds in Europe and Africa.

Source: International Herald Tribune

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