October 21, 2005

 

Latin America scrambles to protect region from bird flu
 

 

Scrambling to guard Latin America from a possible pandemic, countries from Mexico to Brazil focused on measures Thursday to protect the region from bird flu.

 

The economic health of the region could also be at stake. Brazil, South America's largest economy and the world's largest exporter of chicken, said it could cost hundreds of millions of dollars just to contain an outbreak.

 

And in Peru, officials were gearing up for a high-level meeting Friday for health officials from six Andean nations in Lima, to coordinate a regional contingency plan to prevent the spread of bird flu.

 

Mexico on Thursday set aside US$55 million that would be partly used to invest in technology that would enable Mexico to develop a vaccine against bird flu.

 

The money would also be used to obtain a stockpile of existing antiviral drugs and antibiotics, buy protective material for health personnel and fund nationwide monitoring for early detection of cases of a potential human strain of bird flu.

 

"This shouldn't be cause for panic," Mexican Health Secretary Julio Frenk said. "There isn't a worldwide pandemic right now. We are simply preparing for an event that experts say could occur at some point, but which hasn't occurred."

 

Officials and experts agreed that Latin America was possibly the last place in the world migratory birds might spread the flu. That was because birds flying south from the United States were not believed to have intermingled with birds heading to America from Russia's Siberian region, where one of the latest outbreaks occurred.

 

But Latin American officials said they could not afford to take any chances. Ahead of the meeting in Lima, Peruvian Health Minister Pilar Mazzetti told Radio 1160 that she and counterparts from Chile, Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador and Venezuela would discuss unified border controls and a joint response for an outbreak.

 

In Brazil, local media reported that the government has already set aside more than US$440 million needed to contain and treat the disease. Health ministry spokeswoman Marionita Queiroz said this amount would not be allocated unless an outbreak actually happened.

 

Poultry production in South America's largest country rose 8 percent last year, with exports skyrocketing 26 percent in part because of the outbreak of bird flu in Asia. Brazil on Wednesday set up checkpoints at ports and airports to examine birds shipped into the country.

 

The only case of bird flu identified so far in Latin America was in western Colombia recently, but Colombia's national poultry association said the virus was a mild strain of avian influenza not related to the sickness that has killed dozens of people in Asia.

 

That strain, H5N1, has decimated Asian flocks and recently spread into Romania and Turkey.