China, Vietnam Report More Bird Flu Outbreaks

By Lindsay Beck and Ben Blanchard

BEIJING (Reuters) – China and Vietnam reported major bird flu outbreaks in poultry on Friday, days before global health experts meet to refine plans to control the virus that has killed more than 60 people in Asia and spread to Europe.

Experts say the virus must be stopped in poultry to prevent more people catching it and nowhere is that fight more crucial than in densely populated Asia, where farmers and even city dwellers live side-by-side with poultry and other livestock. In China, the world’s most populous nation, officials are struggling to control the spread of bird flu in poultry.

In the fourth outbreak in a month, nearly 9,000 chickens had died and 369,000 domestic birds culled within a three-km (2-mile) radius in the northeast province of Liaoning, an official at the Agriculture Ministry said. The outbreak was detected last week.

"370,000 in one outbreak to be destroyed is really, really big. This is not a good signal," said Noureddin Mona, China representative for the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization.

In Vietnam, where 41 people have died of avian influenza, a 24-year-old pregnant woman with a fever and respiratory problems is the latest suspected case in Asia after Indonesia said on Thursday three children were being tested for bird flu. The results are due in a few days.

State media said the woman came from Bac Giang province where bird flu has infected poultry in three communes, killing more than 3,000 chickens, ducks and geese. Bac Giang is near the capital Hanoi.

The World Health Organization has said H5N1 is endemic in most poultry flocks in Asia and experts say migratory birds, which act as hosts for the virus, could be spreading it.

The virus has already surfaced in eastern Europe in birds, though no human infections have been detected there.

In Asia, though, it was killed 62 people in Asia and infected 122 since late 2003. It remains hard for people to catch and is spread almost exclusively through human contact with birds.

But scientists say it is steadily mutating and could acquire changes that make it easy to spread from human to human, triggering a pandemic in which millions could die, devastating societies, overburdening health systems and disrupting trade.

MAKE-OR-BREAK MEETING

Highlighting a growing urgency, health and veterinary officials from around the globe meet in Geneva from Monday to discuss plans to control H5N1.

"The Geneva summit will be a make-or-break time for the human threat of H5N1 influenza," The Lancet medical journal said in an editorial.

"There remains no reliable early warning system in place across large parts of the world. This vacuum in surveillance poses the most serious threat to human health," it added.

The United States is already painting a dire picture should a pandemic occur and this week announced a $7.1 billion bird flu action plan.

"An influenza pandemic has the potential to cause more death and illness than any other public health threat," the Health and Human Services department says in its new flu plan, posted on the Internet at http://pandemicflu.gov.

Governments around the world are stockpiling anti-viral drugs and funding development of vaccines. There is no commercially available vaccine for H5N1.

Such is the demand, Swiss drug maker Roche has stopped supplying anti-viral drug Tamiflu to private doctors and pharmacies in Hong Kong. The move follows a similar suspension by Roche in the United States and Canada to head off hoarding by consumers worried about the spread of bird flu.

Vietnam’s health ministry has asked Roche to supply 33 million tablets but Roche said its first delivery could be in January 2007 at the earliest, state-run media reported.

As countries invest more to prevent a pandemic, gaps persisted and stemming the disease in poultry was crucial, said Margaret Chan, head of WHO’s pandemic influenza program.

For now, bird flu is "still very much an animal disease and animal problem," Chan told Reuters. "If we can really control the animal sector, the risk to humans is low."

But many developing countries lack adequate human and financial resources for both animal and human disease surveillance as well as laboratory analysis, she said.

(For more stories, pictures and video on bird flu see http://today.reuters.com/news/globalcoverage2.aspx?src=cms)

(Additional reporting by Ho Binh Minh in Hanoi, Kim Coghill in Hong Kong, Patricia Reaney in London, Stephanie Nebehay in Geneva and Maggie Fox in Washington)