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"Rogue" states and Africa need bird flu help: official

Posted on: Friday, 3 February 2006, 17:23 CST

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.

Source: REUTERS

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