WHO tries to calm bird-flu fear

2004-02-03 18:22

Bangkok - Health and food experts from around the world opened an emergency meeting on Tuesday on Asia's bird-flu outbreak as the death toll rose to 13 and United Nationas officials sought to dampen fears of the virus striking large numbers of people.

A seven-year-old boy became the fourth person to die from the disease in Thailand. There have been nine fatalities in Vietnam.

An outbreak in China's poultry stocks, meanwhile, appeared to widen with newly confirmed or suspected cases reported in six provinces.

Asia's bird-flu crisis topped the agenda at a three-day emergency meeting that began in Rome on Tuesday at the headquarters of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation.

The experts meeting in Rome hope to work out strategies to help affected countries tackle the emergency as well as prevent future outbreaks.

Joseph Domenech, chief of the FAO animal health department, addressed the concern that the virus could mutate.

Human-to-human transmission possible

"Today, we are not at this stage, but until now the veterinary, the animal outbreaks are multiplying, it's still an increasing curve, so if it continues that way the risks are still more and more important," he said.

In Geneva, the World Health Organisation sought to calm fears that two Vietnamese women may have contracted the virus from a human.

Investigators announced on Monday they could not trace the infections of the two women to contact with chickens and said human-to-human transmission could not be ruled out.

"We do not at this stage have a pandemic strain of influenza," said Mike Ryan, head of WHO's global epidemic response network.

"We have a strain of influenza with the potential to pick up human genes and we're nowhere close to declaring a pandemic."

Neither a human, nor a chicken, source could be ruled out in the Vietnam case.

However, but even if the women did catch the disease from a family member, limited human-to-human transmission of the virus was not the real danger.

What experts fear is the virus mutating into a form that passes easily between people - a pandemic strain that is a hybrid of the bird virus and a normal human influenza variety.

"What we really need to be able to do in this particular case is rapidly detect any (genetic) changes in the makeup of the virus," Ryan said.

"We're not dealing with an imminent threat to public health, but we are dealing with a potential threat."

Indonesia acknowledged finding the same deadly H5N1 strain of bird flu that has jumped to humans elsewhere in Asia, but said no people in the country have been infected.

Previously, local officials said only milder versions of bird flu - ones not known to infect humans - had been confirmed.

Ten countries are battling bird flu and at least 45 million chickens have been slaughtered across the region to stop its spread.

- AP