November 21, 2005

 

G-7 pledges to up efforts to tackle bird flu

 

 

The G-7 pledged Friday to reinforce efforts to tackle the threat of bird flu, including boosting capacity to produce human flu vaccines in case of a pandemic.

 

US Deputy Health Secretary Alex Azar said bird flu was the "major theme" of the two-day conference in Rome about global health risks.

 

Health officials from the G-7 countries, as well as representatives from Mexico and the EU said in a statement that they would continue to compare national plans to prepare against any human flu pandemic. They fear a mutation of the H5N1 bird flu strain could spawn such a pandemic among people.

 

"It is essential that we keep these under review," said UK Deputy Health Minister Rosie Winterton. "They cannot be set in stone."

 

Participating countries also said they had agreed to work with the WHO to increase production capacity and access to vaccines.

 

Bird flu has ravaged poultry stocks across Southeast Asia since 2003. The virus has infected humans there-most of them poultry workers-and has killed at least 64 people. Experts are afraid that the H5N1 virus could mutate into a form easily spread from human to human.

 

The worldwide capacity to immediately produce seasonal flu vaccines had recently been stepped up from 300 million doses to 425 million doses, said WHO's assistant director-general for communicable diseases Margaret Chan, but she added that "that is a very small production capacity."

 

WHO officials said it was impossible to give a number of the total doses that would be sufficient for any pandemic because of several unknown variables, including what age group it would target and how easily transmissible the pandemic virus would be.

 

Azar said that the US government had proposed US$2.2 billion to Congress to fund research into producing cell-based vaccines in addition to US$4.7 billion to invest in existing egg-based vaccine production.

 

"Only through cell-based production will we ever achieve the capacity the world needs," he said.

 

Conference delegates were also discussing chemical, radiological and nuclear threats.

 

During the Rome conference, Italian and US health officials signed an accord to strengthen cooperation between their two countries in tackling cancer, bioterrorism and rare diseases, following a workshop on their efforts against health risks.