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Poultry cull may boost virus
29/01/2004 16:52 - (SA)
Geneva - The unsafe culling of poultry to fight the spread of bird flu may increase the risk of the virus mutating into a strain that can be transmitted from person to person, a World Health Organisation spokesperson said on Thursday.
The WHO has warned that while humans have so far only caught the disease through contact with infected birds or their droppings, it could claim millions of lives if it mutates into a form that can be passed among humans - a risk that rises with the more people who fall ill.
"If (the killing of birds) is done in such a way that exposes more people, then this ... could be increasing the risk of developing a strain that you would not want to see," said Dick Thompson, the WHO spokesperson.
"From what we can see ... many of these culling workers are not wearing the right personal protection equipment, we are also unsure how many of these people have been vaccinated against (normal) influenza," he said.
The virus, which has swept through 10 Asian countries, has so far led to the deaths or culling of more than 20 million poultry. But it has claimed just 10 human lives in Vietnam and Thailand.
A sequence of factors must happen for the deadly H5N1 strain of bird flu to mutate into a form that can pass from human to human, Thompson explained.
Someone who catches avian influenza must also have regular human flu and the two viruses must mix in a way to produce a second generation disease that is transmittable among humans, he said.
"It is really a matter of coincidence," Thompson said.
"We are concerned right now because there is a lot of unsafe culling going on and this is potentially increasing the probability of the virus infecting more people."
In addition, there is a rise in cases of regular human influenza in Vietnam for example, according to the spokesperson.
Vietnam is one of the countries worst affected by the bird flu crisis.
"If you get enough people infected with avian influenza and some of those people have influenza at the time of their infection and these things do recombine, as this virus seems predisposed to do, then you would get a strain that you would not want to see," said the spokesperson.
"But how likely are each of those events to occur, we don't have a precise fix on."
- AFP
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