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We can beat bird flu if Europe helps the world
Sunday April 9, 2006
The Observer
A dead swan floats ashore and is found to carry
a virus with the potential to cause a deadly pandemic.
Naturally, it feels like a harbinger of terrible
things, not least because experts once warned
that the spread of bird flu to Britain was inevitable.
But a scientific forecast is not the same as a
prophecy of doom.
Our response has to be proportionate and happily,
so far, it has been. The virus that killed one
British swan is not easily transmitted to humans
and not at all communicable between them. Sensible
measures are already in place to contain the disease,
measures that were planned and well-rehearsed.
As we report today, David Nabarro, the United
Nation's global co-ordinator on bird flu, says
that Britain has among the best plans in the world
for dealing with the disease in birds and its
possible spread to humans. Unfashionable though
it is to say it, we have good grounds for trusting
the government to get this right. Compare our
situation with that in the United States, where
there are insufficient antiviral drugs for even
one-100th of the population. We can supply one
quarter, covering those most at risk. For months
now, the NHS and police have been testing plans
to deal with a major public-health crisis.
If a pandemic of lethal flu were to hit Britain,
it would have terrible social and economic consequences,
but the vast majority of us would live through
it unscathed. Tragically, that cannot be said
of most other populations in the world. The effects
in sub-Saharan Africa, for example, where populations
are already weakened by HIV and malaria, would
be catastrophic. Though the threat of bird flu
has prompted investment in vaccine technologies,
predicting future mutations of the virus is difficult.
Containing the spread of the disease among birds
is the best measure currently available. It is
now endemic in poultry and wildfowl across south
east Asia and parts of eastern Europe. The biggest
danger lies in countries where birds and people
live in close proximity. The scientific consensus
is that here doctors would have only a few weeks
to identify a mutated form of the disease and
to isolate infected people before it began to
spread globally.
This makes it essential that countries where
flocks are heavily infected do everything possible
to enforce biosecurity - the physical separation
of species. This tactic has already worked in
Vietnam and Thailand and is working, albeit patchily,
in Turkey. But others lag behind. Indonesia, for
example, suffers unnecessary human casualties
because its poultry farmers resist changing the
conditions in which they keep birds and are reluctant
to cull them at the first sign of infection.
China's Communist party, by keeping the country
closed to international intervention, is also
an obstacle to protecting Asia and the rest of
the world. The World Health Organisation has stockpiles
of drugs to target specific outbreaks, but there
is not yet a coherent multinational strategy that
would pool resources, including people, to contain
the spread of the disease in the poorest parts
of the world.
Meanwhile, it is up to individual governments.
Only they can explain the risks to people, set
up surveillance systems to pick up diseased birds
and compensate farmers properly - and in ways
that do not encourage bogus culling for financial
gain.
The threat to Britain does not come from a hapless
swan. It comes from those countries that fail
to co-operate to halt the disease before it spreads
outside their own borders. But, equally, it comes
from a failure by those governments that are well
prepared to share their expertise and resources
with poorer countries that are not.
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