Bird flu claims 5th Egyptian
2006-05-05 10:29
Cairo - A fifth person died from bird flu in Egypt on Thursday and experts in Asia expressed concern that poorer countries were unable to put up a co-ordinated fight against the rapid spread of the H5N1 virus.
The woman died in a Cairo hospital soon after the World Health Organisation confirmed she was the 13th person to be diagnosed with bird flu in Egypt. That would bring the global human toll from the disease to 206 cases, with 114 deaths.
Tests at a WHO laboratory confirmed H5N1 in birds in the West African nation of Ivory Coast, and officials there said they were putting extra control measures into place.
Nigeria, Niger, Cameroon and Burkina Faso had already confirmed outbreaks of H5N1 bird flu this year, but so far no human infections had been found.
Asia 'might be more dangerous'
Scientists working on the African continent had expressed fear that lack of diagnostic tests and trained people to look for it meant the disease could be infecting people and animals without being found.
United States under-secretary for Democracy and Global Affairs Paula Dobriansky said that Asia might be more dangerous. Dobriansky said: "Asia continues to be a pivotal region in which to fight the virus."
At a meeting in Singapore on Thursday, health specialists said that Asia's surveillance networks to detect bird flu in poultry and people were so varied and weak in some countries they were hampering the fight against the virus.
Pandemic preparedness plans
Worse still, they said, poor co-operation among government departments in Asia and elsewhere threatened to derail pandemic preparedness plans if the virus mutated and raced through the human population.
Lance Jennings, clinical virologist at Canterbury Health Laboratories in New Zealand, said: "A third of the world's population is in India and China, and the surveillance activities are rudimentary."
Japan, Taiwan and Thailand were among the few countries widely seen as having the right networks to find and contain the H5N1 virus.
Impoverished countries such as Laos, Cambodia and Myanmar had no networks in place.
Compensation for farmers
Jai Narain, director of the WHO's communicable diseases department for Southeast Asia, said surveillance among poultry was a major concern because of a lack of compensation for farmers, who often tried to hide their backyard chickens and ducks after health inspectors visited.
At a meeting in Vietnam of the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation, Australia and Singapore said they would lead an international exercise in June to test communications preparedness for a possible bird flu pandemic.
European officials said countries there should not relax their barriers against the virus.
The African migration season lasted until the end of May, but some European countries had begun easing bans on keeping their domestic poultry flocks outside.