October 31, 2005

 

Vietnam needs US$50 million to fight bird flu

 

 

Vietnam said Monday it needed tens of millions of dollars to fight the spread of bird flu as disaster coordinators from Pacific rim nations met in Australia, to hammer out ways to stop emerging diseases skipping across the region's borders.

 

Vietnam's Vice Minister of Agriculture Bui Ba Bong said the country needed US$50 million and help in building up its stockpile of bird flu drugs, as it struggled to keep a lid on the virus.

 

"Vietnam wants to use this meeting as an opportunity to ask member countries for cooperation and support," Bong said.

 

Vietnam has been hardest hit by bird flu, which has killed more than 40 people in the country and prompted authorities to destroy tens of millions of poultry.

 

"We also are getting a high number of people infected by the H5N1 virus, so we would like to call the region's attention to the situation in Vietnam," Bong said.

 

Vietnam had enough antiviral drugs to treat 60,000 people but Bong said the country of 8.2 million needed far more. Officials said last week they wanted enough to treat 30 percent of its population.

 

Disaster and pandemic coordinators from the 21-member Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum, along with health, animal and quarantine officials, were meeting for the first time to formulate a plan on the best ways to deal with various threat levels posed by diseases such as bird flu. That included coordinated responses to humans infected by poultry, limited human-to-human transmissions and extensive spread among humans, senior Australian officials have said.

 

"It's going to be an opportunity for us to look at what preparations we've made, and then improve on those if we have to and, perhaps, set up some region-wide, APEC response mechanism, if that's really called for," Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer told the Nine television network.

 

The participants would also work to improve communications and information sharing about bird flu outbreaks across the region, and to identify areas of cooperation that needed improvement.

 

Officials said talks in the eastern Australian city of Brisbane would also discuss how to maintain essential services such as power and water, and when it might be appropriate to seal off national borders. Regional stockpiling of vaccines and antiviral drugs may also be discussed.

 

The meeting came as a precursor to the APEC forum summit that was expected to bring top officials together in Busan, South Korea, in mid-November. Fighting avian influenza and trying to prevent a flu pandemic were expected to be high on the agenda there as well.

 

The region already got a taste of just how much devastation an infectious disease could cause. In 2003, SARS, or Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, emerged in Asia and spread rapidly across the world through air travel, killing nearly 800 people and causing millions of dollars in economic losses.

 

Later that same year, the H5N1 bird flu virus began ravaging poultry stocks across the region and jumping from birds to people. Since then, it has killed at least 62 people in Southeast Asia, and health experts worried the virus could eventually be capable of causing much more harm.

 

As migratory birds spread the H5N1 virus to poultry in Europe, many more nations were expressing the same concerns, fearing the virus - which is now hard for humans to catch - could somehow mutate into a highly contagious form that spreads easily from person to person. The result could be a global pandemic that kills millions and cripples economies.

 

APEC members included Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Taipei, China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Peru, Philippines, Russia, Singapore, Thailand, the US and Vietnam.

 

Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar were expected to attend the meeting as observers along with several international organisations.