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U.N. says flu
pandemic threat grows, Turkey fights on |
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ANKARA (Reuters) - The threat of a bird flu pandemic is growing daily, a top World Health Organisation (WHO) official said on Thursday, as Turkish officials stepped up efforts to halt outbreaks in people and poultry. Shigeru Omi, the WHO's regional director for the Western Pacific, said Asia was still the epicentre of the threat to global health but that a pandemic was not inevitable if countries and health bodies responded quickly.
"As the new cases of human infection with the H5N1 virus in Turkey show, the situation is worsening with each passing month and the threat of an influenza pandemic is continuing to grow every day," he told a two-day meeting of Asian countries and international organisations on bird flu in Tokyo. Experts say the H5N1 virus could become more active in the colder months in affected regions, and spread in east Asia as people slaughter chickens for Lunar New Year celebrations. The more it becomes entrenched in poultry flocks, the greater the risk that more humans will become infected. So far, the virus is reported to have infected about 150 people, killing 78 of them in six countries. Indonesia said on Thursday a 29-year-old woman who had bird flu, according to a local test result, had died. |
While it remains essentially a disease in birds, scientists fear the virus could mutate into a form that could spread easily between humans, causing a pandemic in which millions could die. While there is no evidence of human-to-human transmission in Turkey, the large and rapid rise in the number of cases has worried experts. The H5N1 virus has been found in wild birds and poultry in a third of Turkish provinces. It has killed at least two children and infected more than a dozen people in little more than a week. "The pace of fatalities appears to have fallen off quickly. But it is as yet unclear whether this is because the virus has modified or Turkey's approach has been successful," David Nabarro, the U.N.'s senior coordinator for avian influenza, said on Wednesday. He also said the virus appeared to be spreading via wild birds. "It does look as though it is the work of migrating birds. But once in an area, it spreads locally," leading to occasional human infections, he said.
MUST DO MORE He was confident delegates to next week's bird flu conference in Beijing would pledge the needed amount. The virus has rapidly infected birds across Turkey, including Ankara, Istanbul and the tourism region near the Aegean coast. Authorities, criticised for an initial slow response, have killed more than 300,000 birds.
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Nabarro cautioned against mass vaccination of poultry. "This is done as a secondary step, when initial measures fail to stem the disease's spread. When a bird is vaccinated, it can still get infected, but just have a lower virus load, so it can still be a carrier while escaping detection." Turkish officials have been stressing that relatively few people there have died, compared to Asia, where H5N1 has had about a 50-percent mortality rate. The WHO said there is no evidence the virus has changed greatly and says patients have been infected by close contact with sick poultry -- in most cases children playing with birds or helping families kill them. "Compared to the numbers in Asia, we do not have too many deaths at the moment," said Dr. Guenael Rodier, head of the WHO mission to Turkey, told a news conference. In East Asia, officials are bracing for a possible jump in bird flu cases in people and poultry during the Lunar New Year period at the end of this month when chicken will be standard fare on dining tables and millions of people will be on the move. "We are afraid of the risks, with more imports, the risks of infected chickens coming in will be greater. And if that happens, the risks of human beings getting infected will go up," said Leo Poon, a microbiologist at the University of Hong Kong. Eating well-cooked chicken poses no danger but slaughtering and handling infected chickens does. (Additional reporting by Irwin Arieff in New York, George Nishiyama in Tokyo, Tan Ee Lyn in Hong Kong and Ade Rina in Jakarta)
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