Bird flu 'heading for America'
Bird flu could reach the Americas in six to 12 months or even sooner following its rapid expansion through Asia, Europe and Africa, the UN bird flu chief said yesterday.
David Nabarro said wild birds are carrying the H5N1 virus and their migratory patterns will probably take some infected birds from west Africa to the Arctic and Alaska this spring.
Some infected birds will then probably move south in the autumn on a different migratory route into the Americas, he said.
“I think it’s within the next six to 12 months, and who knows? We’ve been wrong on other things. It may be earlier.”
So far, human cases are uncommon and virtually all people who have got bird flu have had close contact with infected poultry.
But scientists worry that the virus may mutate into a form that can pass easily between people, which could lead to a worldwide flu epidemic.
Dr Nabarro reiterated the World Health Organisation’s warning that “there will be a pandemic sooner or later” in humans, perhaps due to H5N1, perhaps due to another influenza virus, and it could start any time.
There is already an epidemic in bird flu, called “an epizootic” in animals, which is gradually transforming itself into a pandemic, or “panzootic”, he said.
“Because it is moving and because we believe wild birds are implicated, predicting where it’s going to flare up next is a very tricky thing to do, and being able to know the scale of the flare-up is also quite tricky,” Dr Nabarro said.
The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and the World Organisation for Animal Health are “very challenged by the expansion in the incidence of avian influenza that’s occurred during the last three months as it’s moved through eastern Europe, into western Europe into the Middle East, into India, into Africa”, he said.
“And they’re expecting it to continue to expand.”
Dr Nabarro said the UN is focusing on reducing the amount of H5N1 in poultry, through culling and vaccinations.
The FAO and the Organisation for Animal Health are putting together “an emergency cadre of vets who are able to travel to trouble spots in the world where there is avian influenza at a moment’s notice”, he said.
The prime focus at the moment is on Africa, especially west Africa where many families rely on chickens for their economic livelihoods and have no money to build coops or soap to help prevent H5N1 infections, he said.
“There is a regional crisis in west Africa associated with H5N1” with Nigeria and Niger already affected, Dr Nabarro said. “But we are frankly anticipating that we will find the virus in other west African countries and there is a lot of preparatory work under way.”
In western Europe, there are a lot of reports of H5N1 in dead wild birds from an increasing number of countries ”but there are very few instances of movement of the virus into the domestic and commercial poultry populations”, he said.
The US government hopes to test 75,000 to 100,000 live and dead birds this year, a significant increase over past years, and much of the effort will focus on Alaska, according to US Department of Agriculture officials.
Dr Nabarro said an international conference on wild birds will be held in June, which is expected to include the results of research now under way. The next major international review of global bird flu efforts will also be in June, he said.
“We have to behave as though this could start any time, because if we don’t, we’ll put off getting prepared,” Dr Nabarro said.
