Bird Flu Raises Concern On Global Alert System

by Marwaan Macan-Markar

(IPS) BANGKOK -- Although countries hit by bird flu appear to be more open with their reports about the lethal virus, a concern was born at the outbreak of the disease -- whether current global systems for alerting the world to new viruses are adequate.

That is due to the agreements that governments have with the World Health Organization (WHO) about how word should first get out if a country is struck by either a new hitherto unknown disease or the re-emergence of a known killer virus.

As it is, the UN's health agency is completely dependent on information supplied by government officials about the state of a country's health, as opposed to the WHO serving as a completely independent body with the powers to detect the presence of viruses.

The impression this gives rise to -- that the WHO's reports lack credibility because they are based on data fed by state agencies -- is a factor that the global health body has had to contend with as bird flu reared its head in some Asian countries, like China, Thailand and Vietnam.

''WHO is very aware of any perception that it is acting as a mouthpiece for government,'' Peter Cordingley, spokesman for WHO's Western Pacific office based in Manila, told IPS. ''This scenario affects our public statements.''

''Whenever necessary or relevant, we are careful to make it clear that the statistics and assessments we are giving are based upon government information and that we have asked for information to back up these statements,'' he explained. ''But it is true that we are not the World Health Police.''

What happened in Thailand helps illustrate what prevails at the frontlines of an emerging battle with a lethal virus. Over the past month, the government has grown increasingly confident in making public news of the poultry population infected by the deadly H5N1 strain of the virus.

Bangkok was as forthcoming when officials admitted over the weekend that avian flu had jumped the species barrier, following traces of the flu detected in domestic cats, a clouded leopard and a white tiger.

News about the toll in the country were also broadcast -- where by this week seven people had died due to the disease out of the 21 patients admitted to hospitals with possible symptoms of the lethal virus.

In addition, the government admits to slaughtering an estimated 30 million chickens to contain the disease.

However, such openness is in stark contrast to the denial mode that the government of Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra was in about the disease till late January. And that despite there being ample media reports about poultry dying in the thousands in affected farms across the country. Furthermore, officials from the WHO and the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), which has been the other UN agency helping to contain bird flu, only spoke out about the disease after the Thai government was forced to admit the presence of avian flu in the country's poultry farms.

What brought about this transparency was the stinging criticism the Thai government was subject to by leading importers of Thai chicken such as the European Union, some local health and agriculture experts, and the local and foreign media.

In fact, Asia watchers would have found Bangkok's behaviour a mirror image of Beijing's attitude last year in the wake of another new deadly virus, the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), which began in China and then spread across the planet.

Vietnam, among the worst hit by the flu with 15 people dying due to the disease, has also been stalked by the media and concerned public health officials due to Hanoi's initial lack of openness towards the disease.

As it appears, a combination of reasons, including the failure to contain avian flu when it was first detected in some Asian poultry farms, has resulted in the deadly disease striking at chicken populations in 10 Asian countries.

By this week avian flu was reported to have surfaced in Canada and a fourth state in the United States.

It is thus no wonder the threat of bird flu mutating to becoming a deadly virus passed from human to human -- which the WHO warned could kill many -- has prompted some UN watchers to raise the question of reforming the current global methods of monitoring the outbreak of diseases across the planet.

''Undoubtedly, the WHO has to be able to function beyond sovereign negligence,'' Joan Russow, founder of the Global Compliance Research Project, a think tank based in Victoria, Canada, told IPS. ''It is unconscionable, at a time when increasing pandemic threats to health are prevalent, that sovereign supremacy should interfere with the prevention of these threats.''

According to Russow, the decision by UN member nations to assert the significance of their respective sovereignty has undermined the ''effectiveness of the WHO to perform its essential role to prevent, monitor and mitigate pandemic threats to the global community''.

Russow's concern can be well understood in the wake of WHO officials' admission that new or hitherto unknown diseases are being detected at the rate of at least one per year. According to one WHO report, more than 30 new infectious diseases had emerged during a 25-year period, from 1975 to 2000.

In an effort to strengthen its disease monitoring system, the WHO established the Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network in April 2000. Working with health officials across the world, the network scrutinises virus information supplied to it daily.

Further in May 2001, governments supported a move at the World Heath Assembly to give the WHO power to investigate and assess reports of virus outbreaks even before government officials notify the global health body. Yet as with bird flu this year and SARS last year, governments in some of the affected countries did not live up to commitments toward transparency and openness to contain new viruses.

''We can advise governments and apply pressure through our status as the global authority on public health,'' admitted WHO's Cordingley. ''But we cannot interfere in the internal affairs of sovereign countries.''