Permanent flu watch may be needed for pigs

 

 

Global surveillance of animal disease could be revised to include swine influenza in pigs because of the danger the disease presents to humans, a World Health Organization expert said Monday (May 4).

 

Unlike bird flu, swine flu is not among animal diseases that have to be reported to international authorities, because it is a common illness in pigs and has traditionally been treated as a farming issue.

 

Swine flu had "dropped below the radar of animal health authorities" because it was regarded as "benign," WHO food safety scientist Peter Ben Embarek told AFP.

 

But he said the appearance of a new A(H1N1) virus among humans in Mexico and the United States has highlighted the public health side of the equation.

 

Instead of being detected in humans, like the new virus in Mexico, potentially infectious threats should be spotted in animals first to allow timely intervention, Embarek explained.

 

Notification for swine flu is "certainly an issue that we've started discussing because of this new situation, which we hadn't seen before," Embarek said. "We'll have to discuss this seriously with our animal health colleagues, especially because of the potential implications for human health."

 

Phase one of the WHO pandemic flu alert system should be triggered when a potentially dangerous virus is detected among animals but no infections are reported in humans.

 

With the new swine flu virus, the WHO jumped swiftly into phase four after the outbreak was first announced in Mexico and the United States, because sustained human to human spread was established.

 

The WHO has since moved to phase five out of six, which indicates an active pandemic.

 

Health teams are still trying to track down the origins of the new A(H1N1) influenza virus that has infected 1,025 people in 20 countries, causing 26 deaths, according to WHO.

 

Embarek said evidence should emerge "quite rapidly" of the chain of events that led to the human infection, including whether the new virus jumped from animals into humans, or was mixed in either humans or animals.

 

"It's certain that, if this is the case, an illness that was traditionally transmitted from animals to humans only rarely has suddenly acquired a more dangerous resonance from the public health point of view."

 

This weekend's discovery of the possible infection of a pig herd by a human in Canada added further weight to evidence that the virus could move between humans and animals in either direction, he said.