Asia Concerned As Peak Season For Bird Flu Nears

by Marwaan Macan-Markar

(IPS) BANGKOK -- Just as Thailand begins to celebrate a domestic triumph over the bird flu virus, other parts of Southeast Asia have reason not to let their guard down over this killer disease.

More so, since the heat and humidity that intensifies across the region in the months ahead creates an ideal condition for the virus to breed.

Public health experts admit that another outbreak of the H5N1 virus around July would not be a surprise, since it would be following a pattern established last year.

"The virus could re-emerge in July because that is a flu season in this region," Peter Cordingley, spokesman for the World Health Organization's (WHO) Western Pacific regional office, told IPS. "The virus florishes in the hot season. It is something we expect."

The second outbreak of the lethal virus in July 2004 came after a lull of almost three months. It spread through Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, Cambodia and Indonesia, countries that had been among the 10 nations, including China, affected during the initial phase at the beginning of last year.

This week, Thailand's department of livestock development confirmed that the country had seen the last of the disease in its poultry population since the second outbreak in July 2004.

Such success flowed from the intensive surveillance system that Thailand mounted to check on the vulnerable sections of its poultry in the small, backyard farms across its rural landscape.

To avoid another outbreak, officials from the ministry of agriculture and cooperatives are urging villagers who depend on poultry for their livelihood to give up the customary practice of the open-farm system, where chickens are not protected from contact with other birds. In its place should be the closed-farm system, with strong bio-security measures, they urge.

Thailand has been among the worst hit countries in Southeast Asia since bird flu began sweeping across the region last year. The economic toll, according to the 'Bangkok Post' newspaper, runs into 4.3 billion baht ($107.5 million) on top of the 2.2 billion baht ($55 million ) the Thai government paid farmers affected from the 60 million chickens that were culled or died due to the disease.

Across the region, over 140 million chickens and ducks have perished due to the disease since last January.

In human terms, 12 Thais died after being infected with the H5N1 virus.

Vietnam and Cambodia, where the death rate from bird flu has been 36 and four respectively, are yet to reach the point Thailand has in combatting the disease.

Hanoi confirmed such reality by announcing this week that Vietnam will begin experimenting with a poultry vaccine to control the spread of the deadly virus. An estimated 600,000 chickens in Ho Chi Minh City have been identified for the test, according to news reports.

The push towards vaccinating chickens comes after Vietnam had failed to contain the spread of the H5N1 virus in over half of its 64 provinces. According to a report in the 'New Scientist' news service, "Surveys in April found that in Vietnam's Mekong Delta region, 70 percent of domestic ducks, and 22 percent of chickens, harbored H5N1."

And by agreeing to use the vaccine, made by the French company Merial, Hanoi is departing from a position it took at a bird flu meeting in Thailand last July to consider alternatives to vaccination.

Vietnam's decision, however, will not be unique to the region. Indonesia has gone down this route since the 2004 outbreak by offering vaccines free to chicken farmers for their stocks.

Yet, as animal health experts have noted, the vaccine option is a challenge, since the entire poultry population in a country needs to be vaccinated for this preventive measure to be a success.

In Cambodia, on the other hand, where bird flu has not spread as widely as in Thailand and Vietnam, concern lies over its weak public health system. The poverty-stricken country sets aside only three U.S dollars per person every year to fund its health system.

"There are huge health challenges facing Cambodia and it is not realistic to expect it to divert resources to disease surveillance systems," Dr. Jim Tulloch, WHO's country representative in Cambodia, told IPS.

Nevertheless, Phnom Penh has mounted a preventive campaign in the bird-flu affected area of Kampot, which lies along the eastern border Cambodia shares with Vietnam.

"Villagers in the area are being asked about sick birds and about people with respiratory illnesses," said Tulloch. "But we don't expect all cases to be reported to the authorities."

This week, Cambodia's health ministry confirmed that a 20-year-old woman from Kampot province had died of bird flu in mid-April. The first bird-flu related death in Cambodia also occurred in that province on Jan. 31.

The bird-flu death toll in Cambodia stands out as the most disturbing in the region, since all four people infected by the virus have died. In Vietnam and Thailand the incidence rate is marginally lower, between 60 to 70 percent of the infected people dying. In Vietnam there have been 68 reported cases, of which 36 have died, and in Thailand there have been 17 cases, of which 12 have died.

But public health bodies like the WHO have sounded the alarm about a more frightful prospect evolving if this lethal virus mutates -- a global pandemic that could kill millions of people the way the 1918 flu pandemic did.

That is because the world still lacks a vaccine to protect people from the deadly virus and humans lack a natural response to fight the disease.