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The global impacts of bird flu
Michael Richardson, Singapore
Asia has been severely jolted by the recent turmoil in credit and stock markets spreading from the United States to other economies around the world. This is a crisis in economic management and the health of financial systems in an interlocking and increasingly interdependent global economy.
But with millions of people crossing national borders by air, land and sea each day for trade, business and tourism, human and animal health are also matters of international concern. Today, a contagious disease in one country can quickly pass to many others. Could a virulent avian influenza virus create a perfect storm of panic by learning to jump easily from birds to people, creating a human transmission chain and a global pandemic that kills millions and cripples economies?
The H5N1 strain of bird flu virus which most worries epidemiologists at present caused a nasty shock in Hong Kong just over a decade ago, killing six people and forcing the territory to slaughter its entire stock of poultry. The virus resurfaced in 2003.
Since then, according to the United Nations, it has spread to more than 60 countries in Asia, Africa, Europe and the Middle East, resulting in the deaths or slaughter of hundreds of millions of birds. So far, it remains a rare but highly lethal disease for humans. Of some 350 people reported to have been infected, 219 have died -- a frighteningly high mortality rate.
Most of the cases have been in Indonesia, Vietnam and China. But Pakistan and Burma reported their first human infections last month. India and Bangladesh are currently battling major outbreaks of bird flu among poultry.
A report in November by David Nabarro, the UN official coordinating the global fight against avian flu, and the World Bank warned that controlling the disease in animals lay at the root of preventing human infections and reducing the probability of another pandemic.
Normal seasonal flu is estimated to kill between 250,000 -- 500,000 people a year. The last pandemics, in 1957 and 1968, killed a total of around three million. A pandemic in 1918 caused by a strain of avian flu that mutated so that it could more easily infect humans is estimated to have caused the deaths of 40 -- 50 million people worldwide, yet its mortality rate was only around 3 per cent.
However, a pandemic on this scale at a time global economic stress would probably tip the world into a deep recession. High rates of illness and absenteeism would contribute to economic disruption as people stopped traveling and mainly stayed at home for fear of infection. The disruption would be greatest if the numbers of people unable or unwilling to go to work caused a breakdown in essential services, such as power, transportation, communication and possibly even health care and food supply.
Margaret Chan, the doctor who handled the 1997 H5N1 outbreak in Hong Kong and now heads the World Health Organization, warned this week in her report to the WHO executive board that recent developments on the bird flu front were "stark reminders that the threat of an influenza pandemic has by no means diminished."
Not all experts share such concerns. Bernard Vallat, director general of the World Organization for Animal Health, said earlier this month that the risk of the H5N1 virus changing into a form that could spread easily among humans has been overestimated. He said that so far the virus had been extremely stable and this minimized the risk of mutation.
However, the UN-World Bank report in November cautioned that once the virus was entrenched in the animal population, "control and elimination become a major challenge, and the risk of human infection with H5N1 increases." The report said that the strain was endemic in poultry and wild birds in Indonesia, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Egypt, Nigeria and China. To this list, India should now be added.
If there is another pandemic, will the virus be a monster that causes highly lethal superflu or something less serious? No one knows for sure. So even as governments and their agencies around the world worry about the possibility of an economic meltdown, they should remain vigilant and channel substantial resources into improving veterinary services and animal health in developing countries -- particularly in those where avian flu is entrenched among poultry and wild birds.
The writer, a former Asia editor of the International Herald Tribune, is a security specialist at the Institute of South East Asian Studies in Singapore.
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