“Rogue” states and Africa need bird flu help: official

By Paul Eckert, Asia Correspondent

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S.-led efforts to fight bird flu
– so far focused on Southeast Asia — need to be extended to
North Korea and other pariah regimes as well as to vulnerable
Africa, U.S. officials said on Friday.

Turkey and Iraq last month became the latest countries
outside Asia to report human cases of the H5N1 strain of avian
flu. While it mostly affects birds, bird flu has infected 161
people and killed 86 of them since 2003, according to the World
Health Organization.

Nancy Powell, the State Department senior coordinator for
avian and pandemic influenza, said Washington would work
through the UN system to reach Myanmar, North Korea, Iran and
other countries shunned by the United States and some of its
allies as “rogue” regimes.

“It is an issue and … the birds don’t know the
difference,” Powell told a symposium on bird flu hosted by the
CNA Corporation, a nonpartisan think tank.

“We will have to find ways to use the international system
when we don’t have our individual ability to go in and work
with those countries,” she said.

The self-isolated military junta of Myanmar had developed a
national bird flu plan and worked with the WHO, she said.

“We are less certain about what’s happening in North Korea,
but WHO and FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization) do have the
ability to work with them,” Powell said. “We’re hoping that
China, with its experience, will provide some support.”

AFRICA FACES “ENORMOUS RISK”

She added that recent outbreaks in Turkey and Iraq made
U.S. officials “curious about what is happening in Iran and
hoping that they and Syria … are working (on bird flu).”

On Thursday, U.S. intelligence chief John Negroponte told a
Senate committee looking into the range of threats to the
United States that Washington was monitoring the bird flu
situation in countries “where we cannot be confident that
adequate information will be available through open sources.”

Powell said Washington hoped the lessons learned by
Thailand, Indonesia and Vietnam — the epicenter of the disease
– could be applied to Africa and other vulnerable regions.

The flight paths of migratory birds, blamed for the spread
of bird flu, crossed eastern Africa, where countries are poor
and ill-prepared for epidemics, said William Steiger, a senior
U.S. health official.

“The risk is enormous. There’s no question that the
migratory flyways, especially down the Rift valley, present a
great deal of concern to African governments,” he said.

“We have worked pretty intensively in the past few weeks to
figure out inside the U.S. government what our strategy is
going to be toward Africa,” said Steiger, head of the Office of
Global Health Affairs at the Department of Health and Human
Services.

Washington supported an emerging infections detection and
response system in Kenya, and the U.S. Agency for International
Development was investing in surveillance projects in Ethiopia
and Tanzania along migratory bird flyways, he added.