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.