Simon Schneller

UNITED NATIONS, Jan 12 2006 (IPS) – The avian flu virus, which has spread from Asia to Turkey, may still have some nasty surprises in store , a senior official of the World Health Organisation (WHO) warned Thursday.
I do not believe an influenza pandemic will inevitably spring from the crisis the world is facing at the moment, explained Shigeru Omi, WHO s regional director for the Western Pacific region.

Yes, the situation is very serious and getting worse. But it is still within our power to change the course of this epidemic, he told a conference in Japan on Thursday.

About 1.5 billion dollars is expected to be mobilised for the worldwide battle against bird flu at an International Pledging Conference set for Jan. 17-18 in Beijing, U.N. System Influenza Coordinator David Nabarro told reporters at U.N. headquarters Wednesday.

The donations are needed mainly to help poor countries implement their influenza programmes and design more effective controls.

More than 90 countries, as well as groups like the WHO, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and the World Organisation of Animal Health (OIE), have been invited to the meeting, which is co-sponsored by the Chinese government, the World Bank and the European Commission.
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Nabarro emphasised that the numbers, which are based on estimates primarily from the World Bank, are not definitive figures .

I am not for a minute suggesting that the amounts of money we are talking about at the Beijing meeting are all that is going to be needed, he said.

The United States is likely to contribute a reasonable amount of the total , Nabarro added. Some unconventional countries , which Nabarro did not name, are expected to donate higher sums.

Most of the countries are aware of the seriousness and the need to move money to poor countries, Nabarro said.

Over the past few months, a genuine global coalition has taken shape. Some of the world s wealthiest nations have joined forces with donor agencies and specialist bodies to offer assistance to affected countries, Omi said in Tokyo.

If we can achieve this rapid response, we may have a good chance of halting the spread of the virus before the situation becomes uncontrollable, he said, adding that if control efforts fail, the consequences for societies, economies and global public health could be immeasurable .

As the new cases of human infection with the H5N1 virus in Turkey show, the situation is worsening with each month and the threat of an influenza pandemic is continuing to grow, he said.

Despite the negative news of recent weeks, Nabarro reported many positive developments since his last update in November 2005.

In the last two months, things really got moving. Countries have called on their officials to massively scale up their response and to get ready to address the pandemic and its impact, he said.

Nabarro cited Vietnam s bird immunisation programme, as well as stepped up government efforts to curb the virus in China and Indonesia. He also praised Turkey for quickly putting in place the most up-to-date treatment available when the latest wave of suspected cases broke out.

However, he made it clear that still there is more to be done .

Affected and neighbouring countries must be prepared for a pandemic, he said: Infrastructure should be ready to move, while veterinary and laboratory services, and culling teams must be ready to intervene quickly and effectively .

If there is a delay in any part of that chain, even if it s a couple of weeks, that could have great implications for the virus then to spread through the normal movement of birds or people into other communities and into other countries, Nabarro said.

He also pointed to the necessity of a mass communication campaign to inform people about the dangers of the bird flu.

The general public needs to be well informed about the dangers of touching, playing with and certainly eating diseased, or dying or dead birds, Nabarro said.

The outspread of the H5N1 virus to Kazakhstan, Ukraine, the Crimean peninsula, Romania and now Turkey indicates that the virus may be moving westward with migrating wild fowl.

We have learnt that we are dealing with a virus that is not only very resilient but also extremely unstable and unpredictable, Omi said in Japan.

It is still not clear if the H5N1 virus will manage to mutate to allow sustainable human-to- human transmission. Nabarro said that there was no evidence of such contagion in Turkey so far.

In fact, he quoted a report from the Karolinska Institute in Sweden that suggested that the level of fatalities from the avian flu had been slightly overestimated . In other words, more people may have become ill with the virus than has been reported, meaning that a smaller proportion died.

Nabarro also emphasised that the vast majority of poultry is still safe to eat if it is properly cooked at a normal roasting temperature.