SA ill-prepared for bird flu
2005-01-24 22:56
Johannesburg - South Africa was ill-prepared to handle a global bird flu pandemic, a health consultancy said on Monday.
Dr Andrew Jamieson of the SAA Netcare Travel Clinics said the World Health Organisation had identified avian influenza - bird flu - as the most serious new health threat facing humanity.
"If the virus changes and becomes very infectious, experts predict waves of infection that would spread around the world within months."
Jamieson said South Africa would be particularly hard hit, with large numbers of immune compromised individuals in its population.
"Drug and vaccine shortages are likely to be severe, and already overstrained medical facilities will be drastically overloaded."
Jamieson made his comments after the prestigious US health publication, the New England Journal of Medicine in an issue released earlier in the day, reported the first documented case of human to human transmission of the deadly illness.
The transmission occurred in Thailand in October last year when a 12-year-old girl contacted bird flu from poultry and later transmitted it to her mother and an aunt.
The authors of the article and the journal's editors are warning that the risk exists of the strain of bird flu concerned could become a global pandemic.
"Researchers have predicted that in the worst case scenario millions of people around the world would die if the virus becomes easily transmissible from person to person."
The last major global flu pandemic started in August 1918 and lasted to about July the next year.
The US public broadcasting system in a website article says the influenza commonly called the "Spanish flu" killed more people than the guns of World War I (1914-1918).
Estimates put the worldwide death toll at more than 21 million.
- SAPA