Bird flu 'worse than terrorist attack'
A bird flu pandemic in Australia could be more deadly than almost any sort of terrorist attack, the health minister has warned.
Tony Abbott made the remarks late yesterday, a day after Indonesia reported its fourth likely human death from the bird flu virus.
Almost all the people who have died are believed to have contracted the disease from poultry. But experts worry the virus could mutate into a form that could easily spread from person to person, possibly killing millions around the world.
“A pandemic, if it hits Australia … will potentially kill many thousands of people,” Abbott told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. “And it’s hard to imagine any terrorist attack – short of a nuclear bomb – that would have a comparable impact.”
The minister said his government has already spent about 123 million Australian dollars (€77m) on measures to prevent such an outbreak, and is also working on a possible vaccine.
“We have spent everything that we can usefully spend so far,” Abbott said. “We’ve got on a per-capita basis just about the world’s largest stockpile of anti-virals.”
Abbott said Australia was monitoring the spread of avian flu in poultry stocks across Asia, and could be forced to close its borders if a widespread outbreak were to occur in humans.
Bird flu has swept through poultry populations in large swaths of Asia since 2003, leaving 62 people dead – mostly in Vietnam and Thailand – and resulting in the deaths of tens of millions of birds.
