July 30, 2004

U.N. Body Launches Network To Fight Bird Flu In Asia
 

The U.N.'s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) launched a Southeast Asian "bird flu network" Friday to improve surveillance and detection of the killer virus, which is spreading steadily across the region.

The network will offer training to veterinary officials in impoverished countries in the region to allow them to recognize the tell-tale signs of bird flu more quickly.

It will also try to make national disease laboratories coordinate more closely to ensure tissue samples from dead animals are tested more rigorously and faster.

"National borders cannot stop the disease from spreading," said Joseph Domenech, head of animal health at the Rome-based FAO.

"Only regional cooperation is likely to achieve success. Our aim is to improve the quality of diagnosis and epidemiology," he said on the last day of a three-day regional meeting on the disease.

The virulent H5N1 bird flu strain, which first broke out in Hong Kong in 1997, killed millions of chickens and 24 people when it swept across much of Asia earlier this year.

Mass culling brought an end to that outbreak. But after a lull of a few months, bird flu has broken out again in China, Vietnam, Indonesia and Thailand, where 21 of its 76 provinces have confirmed renewed outbreaks.