June 23, 2008

 

Bird flu may aggravate global food crisis

The worst of the bird flu threat may be over but the fight to eliminate the disease from poultry is weak - a situation that could worsen the global food crisis, warns a health expert.

 

Juan Lubroth, a senior official with the United Nations' Food and Agricultural Organization, said the peak may be over but the world is still dealing with "many, small outbreaks."

 

Lubroth said during the 13th International Congress on Infectious Diseases, held in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, that bird flu threat is like a "boiling pot and we need to keep the lid on that before it gets worse".

 

Bird flu is still active in 10 countries, down from 60 that have been affected since 2003. Hot spots include China, Egypt, Indonesia, Nigeria, Pakistan and Vietnam.

 

Lubroth, who is also the head of the FAO's Emergency Prevention System, said the poultry deaths affect 80 percent of the poor who depends on chicken as their livelihood. He said some "drawbacks and weaknesses" remain in the fight to eliminate the deadly H5N1 strain of the bird flu virus from the poultry sector.

 

He warned that failure to protect their food sources could worsen the global food crisis, caused by rising prices of rice, corn and other staples.

 

Lubroth said 240 million birds have died or been slaughtered, and millions of people's livelihoods shattered, because of bird flu.

 

Veterinary services around the world need to be strengthened and more experts trained, while reporting must be more transparent, he said, adding that countries have to use more surveillance and implement policies to deal with the disease. Political commitments for bird flu have by far failed, he said.

 

Besides the threat to the food situation, bird flu could also endanger human lives more directly. Though there have been reports of human-to-human transmission of H5N1 in Hong Kong, Vietnam and Indonesia, none of these cases has been proven.

 

Though experts believe the virus remains difficult for humans to catch, they fear that that it could mutate into a form that spreads easily among humans and trigger a pandemic that could easily kill millions of people.

 

To stop the pandemic, the disease must be tackled from the source--being poultry, poor hygiene and regulatory infrastructures.

 

Still, there was no evidence of sustained human-to-human transmission of H5N1, Nikki Shindo, an infection control specialist at the World Health Organization, told the conference. Bird flu is "not posing a great public health risk" to humans clinically, he said.

 

Shindo said that 385 people have reportedly contracted the disease since 2003, and that 241 of them have died, about half of them in Indonesia.

 

Sardikin Giriputro, who has been at he forefront of Indonesia's campaign against bird flu, said that despite all preparations, "no country is prepared enough for the pandemic."