SEA needs $260 m to fight bird flu

SEA needs $260 m to fight bird flu

Manny Mogato, Reuters/Manila

The World Health Organization (WHO) said on Friday the
international community needed to raise about US$260 million in
the short term to fight the deadly bird flu virus in Southeast
Asia.

"All attempts to bring it under control in Southeast Asia have
failed," Shigeru Omi, the WHO's director in the Western Pacific
region, told foreign correspondents based in Manila.

Health experts believe the H5N1 strain of the avian influenza
virus, which has killed more than 60 people in Asia since 2003,
is moving toward a form that could pass easily among humans.

Underlining the widening threat, European bird flu experts
will hold an emergency meeting on Friday, a day after health
officials confirmed H5N1 had spread from Asia to Turkey and said
that Europe should prepare for a pandemic.

European nations tightened border controls on poultry and
poultry products but fear the real threat could come from
migratory birds bringing the virus home.

South Korea issued a bird flu warning on Friday, saying
migratory birds passing through the Korean peninsula in coming
months might spread the disease and advised farmers to keep
poultry indoors at farms.

Omi said H5N1, now transmitted to people only if they eat
infected birds or live in close contact with them, was
"unpredictable and unstable", raising the chance of it mutating
into a form that could be more virulent to humans.

Experts estimate that, if it acquires the ability to infect
people easily and spread efficiently, it will make more than 25
million people seriously ill and kill as many as 7 million.

Omi called on all countries to report suspected bird flu cases
as soon as possible and share samples collected from infected
poultry and people with the international community.

"Without those samples, we cannot know if the virus is
mutating and if it is any closer to tipping the world into the
unknown," he said.

The WHO said it would need $160 million to provide technical
assistance to affected countries, improve laboratory diagnosis
and surveillance and stockpile medicines such as Tamiflu.

The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) would need
about $100 million to deal with the disease on the animal front.

But Omi said the WHO hoped to generate more pledges from
wealthier states during meetings on bird flu in coming weeks in
Canada, Australia and Switzerland.

To date, about $20 million had been committed to help fight
the disease in Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos and Vietnam, where most
of the deaths caused by the H5N1 strain have been reported.

Experts fear a human outbreak in Laos and Cambodia -- where
basic health care barely exists outside urban areas -- would not
be detected until it is too late.

Last month, the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian
Nations (ASEAN) set up a $2 million fund to help fight the spread
of bird flu and other animal-borne diseases.

The WHO said the spread of bird flu could be traced to poor
farming practices in most developing countries in Southeast Asia,
where there was a high density of humans and birds mingling in
unsanitary conditions.

Comparing the H5N1 strain with other viruses, such as seasonal
flu or Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), Hitoshi
Oshitani, a WHO adviser on communicable diseases, said it had a
mortality rate among confirmed cases at about 50 percent.

The death rate was about 10 percent for SARS and less than 0.1
percent for seasonal flu, he added.