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EU pledges $100 mln as Turkey fights bird flu By Gareth Jones The Star, 14Jan 2006 |
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ANKARA (Reuters) - The European Union pledged $100 million in aid to boost the global fight against bird flu on Friday and Turkey stepped up the culling of birds to try to stop the deadly virus spreading further. Makers of the Tamiflu drug, the best known defense against the deadly H5N1 strain of bird flu, said they would donate more antiviral pills to Asia, the epicenter of the health threat.
The European Union funding comes after World Bank member states endorsed aid worth $500 million to tackle a virus that has jumped from birds to humans and has killed at least 78. A British laboratory found that two of the first Turkish victims were infected with a slightly mutated strain of H5N1. Although it did not seem to be more dangerous, the mutation in theory could help the virus more easily pass from a chicken to a human. Of gravest concern is that the H5N1 virus will mutate so it passes from human to human. The human victims of the disease had all been in east Asia until the recent outbreak in Turkey brought the virus towards the edge of Europe. Three infected children died last week in eastern Turkey and 15 more people have tested positive, but officials say their condition is not critical. Authorities |
are testing whether a four-year-old girl who died on Friday had caught the virus. At least two children, including eight-year-old Sumeyye Mamuk, who tested positive, were discharged from hospital in Van, eastern Turkey, on Thursday after being treated with Tamiflu. "She has completely recovered. This is a success for us. She is the first patient with a positive test to be discharged," Van hospital Dr. Ahmed Faik Oner told Reuters. Two people were admitted to hospital in the southeastern city of Diyarbakir for tests after showing "suspicious" symptoms. The disease has struck poultry in the area. Agriculture Minister Mehdi Eker said Turkey had culled almost 600,000 poultry across the country over the past two weeks. Iran has started culling thousands of birds along its border with Turkey to try to stop the disease spreading. France said it was extending its poultry confinement measures to 58 departments from an original 26 as fears grow over a virus believed to be carried by migratory birds. DRUG STOCKPILE Tamiflu maker Roche told a bird flu conference in Tokyo it was in talks with the World Health Organization (WHO) about donating more of the Tamiflu drug to set up an Asian stockpile. The Swiss firm has already given 30 million capsules to the WHO for "rapid response" stockpiles, part of which have been sent to Turkey, said David Reddy, Roche's flu pandemic taskforce leader. |
Health officials at the Tokyo meeting, attended by more than 20 countries, called for greater surveillance and urged richer countries to help poorer ones achieve that. The United Nations has said donors will need to contribute about $1.4 billion at a conference next week in Beijing to finance the next phase of the global campaign against bird flu. Announcing the EU aid worth $100 million at a news conference in Brussels, EU External Relations Commissioner Benita Ferrero-Waldner said: "I am optimistic we are going to close the financial gap in Beijing." The more birds are infected worldwide, the more likely it is that people may become infected through close contact. As cold weather forces animals and people indoors together, especially in rural areas, animal-to-human infections could become even more common, experts said. The WHO said its experts were working with Turkish officials to study the virus and its patterns of attack. More samples of the virus were en route to laboratories, the WHO said. (Additional reporting by George Nishiyama in Tokyo, Daren Butler in Van, Jeremy Smith in Brussels, Lesley Wroughton, Christopher Doering and Maggie Fox in Washington)
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