Bird flu comes back to haunt Asia
Bird flu comes back to haunt Asia
Ben Rowse
Agence France-Presse
Hanoi
Bird flu has come back to haunt Asia, just months after
governments rushed to declare victory over the disease that
killed 24 people and decimated poultry stocks across the region.
China, Thailand and Vietnam have all reported fresh outbreaks
of avian influenza, confirming earlier warnings by international
disease control experts that the virus would strike again.
"We said at the time that it would take a year to completely
clear the virus from the environment. So we are not entirely
surprised by these developments," Peter Cordingley, spokesman for
the World Health Organization's (WHO) Western Pacific Office in
Manila, told AFP.
"The question we are working on is whether these are just
isolated vestiges of the major outbreak that started in January
or whether we are looking at a new potential crisis."
When Vietnam declared on March 30 that it had contained the
lethal H5N1 strain of the virus, 15 days after claiming its 16th
fatality in the country, it was criticized for acting prematurely
and recklessly.
The WHO warned that it could take months, probably years to
eliminate the virus from the environment and recommended that
farmers wait three months from the last infection date before
restarting production.
Its advice, however, was ignored, and just weeks after Hanoi's
victory declaration the first suspected recurrence occurred in
the southern province of Dong Thap. Subsequently, outbreaks have
been reported in five other provinces.
Meanwhile, Thailand, which has repeatedly had to postpone
plans to declare itself free of bird flu, confirmed Wednesday a
fresh outbreak of the deadly H5N1 strain, dealing another blow to
its already struggling billion-dollar poultry industry.
This came a day after China, one of the world's biggest
poultry producers, announced that H5N1 had been detected on a
farm in the eastern province of Anhui, nearly four months after
claiming victory over the disease.
Vietnam has not formally linked H5N1 to its new outbreaks, but
says it is assuming it is present and consequently will not send
samples to overseas laboratories for analysis.
The WHO, however, says it is essential to formally identify
the virus and to determine if it has undergone any genetic
changes.
At the height of the crisis earlier this year, the UN agency
warned that H5N1 had the potential to kill millions of people
across the globe if it combined with a human influenza virus to
create a new, highly contagious strain transmissible among
humans.
Currently, H5N1 can only be transmitted from birds to humans,
sometimes with fatal consequences, but not from humans to humans.
But the proximity of farm fowl to humans, and also to pigs,
which can harbor both avian and human viruses and act as a vessel
to mix them, poses a special threat, experts say.
Chinese researchers from the University of Hong Kong and
Shantou University Medical School have warned that the chances of
stamping out bird flu are slender.
In a study of the genetic ancestry of the H5N1 virus to be
published on Thursday in the British weekly science journal
Nature, they warn the agent is firmly established in duck and
chicken flocks in China and other countries, and will only be
rooted out by a dedicated, long-term campaign.
"H5N1 virus is now endemic in poultry in Asia and has gained
an entrenched ecological niche from which to present a long-term
pandemic threat to humans," the study said.
The scientists warned that governments in the region "face an
endemic and recurrent problem that presents a serious threat to
human health".
"These developments pose a threat to public and veterinary
health in the region and potentially the world, and suggest that
long-term control measures are required."