WHO Chief Warns of Bird-Flu Consequences By ALEXANDER G. HIGGINS, Associated Press Writer
1 hour, 46 minutes ago
GENEVA - The magnitude of suffering caused by the next human flu pandemic will be "incalculable" if the world is unprepared, the chief of the U.N. health agency said Monday as he urged countries to draw up plans for preparations.
At the first major international coordination meeting on bird flu, a senior World Bank economist said that if the financial fallout of the SARS outbreak two years ago is any indication, a flu pandemic could cause world gross domestic product to drop by 2 percent or more. That would amount to about $800 billion in losses over the course of a year, said Milan Brahmbhatt.
Scientists are watching the spread of the H5N1 strain of bird flu carefully because it could mutate into a form that passes easily to and among humans, sparking a global epidemic capable of killing millions of people.
"We have been experiencing a relentless spread of avian flu" among migratory birds and domestic poultry, Lee Jong-wook, director-general of the World Health Organization, told a meeting of 600 health experts and planners at the organization's headquarters.
Lee stressed that the virus has not become a human strain. Most of the 62 human deaths from bird flu have been linked to close contact with infected birds.
"However, the signs are clear that is coming," he said, noting that a mutated bird flu virus caused the deadly 1918 Spanish flu pandemic that killed about 40 million people. Already the virulent H5N1 strain of bird flu, which was first isolated in birds in 1996 and first infected people in 1997, is killing birds in 15 countries in Europe and Asia, he said.
"It is only a matter of time before an avian flu virus — most likely H5N1 — acquires the ability to be transmitted from human to human, sparking the outbreak of human pandemic influenza," Lee said.
Scientists say that the longer the virus is allowed to circulate among birds, the more opportunities it has to turn into a human strain.
"This is the time for every country to prepare their national action plan — and act on it," Lee said. "If we are unprepared, the next pandemic will cause incalculable human misery — both directly from the loss of human life and indirectly through its widespread impact on security. No society will be exempt. No economy would be left unscathed."
Last week, President Bush proposed that the United States spend $7.1 billion to prepare for a flu pandemic.
Estimates of the number of people who would die in a new pandemic have varied widely between 2 million and 360 million, but WHO says a reasonable maximum would be 7.4 million.
About 60 percent of countries have a pandemic preparedness plan, but in most cases it is only a piece of paper, and those plans "need to move to exercise and rehearsal," said Mike Ryan, WHO's outbreak response director.
"If the pandemic hits this winter, the world would not be able to cope sufficiently," said Spanish Health Minister Elena Salgado.
Although bird flu has recurred over the years, scientists have been tracking H5N1 since its particularly deadly impact on people started to be noticed. In early 2004, officials announced that three people — an adult and two children — had died from the disease in Vietnam.
Since then, more than 120 people, most of whom were in close contact with poultry, have come down with the disease in Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand and Indonesia, WHO says. More than half of those infected have died.
More than 150 million chickens and other poultry have died or been killed, but that has not halted the spread of the disease to birds in central Asia, Russia and eastern Europe.
Samuel Jutzi of the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization said the cost to the economies of the affected countries from the poultry losses alone is estimated above $10 billion.
Representatives from China, Vietnam and Indonesia, among the countries hit hardest by bird flu, pointed to increasing costs for containing the disease. They also said small-scale farming makes it hard to contain the disease.
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Associated Press correspondent Uta Harnischfeger contributed to this report.
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