- GENEVA (Reuters) - It could
take two years to control bird flu among poultry, and people will remain
at a low-level risk of catching the deadly disease, the World Health Organization
said Tuesday.
- Mike Ryan, WHO's global response coordinator for avian
flu, also said in an interview the U.N. agency was sending fresh teams
to China and Laos, bringing to about 50 the number of experts deployed
in the field.
The H5N1 bird flu virus has broken out in eight Asian countries, devastated
poultry flocks and killed at least 14 people in Vietnam and five in Thailand.
The human victims are all believed to have caught the disease from contact
with sick chickens but there are fears the bird flu virus could combine
with a human flu virus and mutate into a new deadly disease that could
be passed between people.
"We are probably looking at six months to two years before some of
these outbreaks can be brought under total control in the poultry population,"
Ryan told Reuters.
"So the reality of that is there is going to be chronic, low-level
exposure of human populations to the virus," he said.
Each such exposure had the potential to generate a modified version of
the new human form of the illness.
Ryan, who heads WHO's Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network, which
tracks epidemics and coordinates international investigations, said the
world must keep up its guard.
It would be a challenge to sustain activities in terms of financing and
in getting partners -- which include agencies such as the U.S. Centers
for Disease Control -- to provide experts to help national health ministries
in their fight.
TEST MIX-UP
WHO also said Tuesday it had jumped the gun in declaring tests on victims
had shown no genetic evidence that bird flu could be passed from person
to person.
Its announcement last Friday had been greeted with huge relief. But the
WHO said that there had been a mix-up in the testing of two Vietnamese
sisters who died after catching it, and that results initially given for
one of them had turned out to be from another patient instead.
The results of genetic sequencing of the virus from the second sister is
due this week, according to a statement.
Ryan said the importance of the results may be overstated.
"The fact is that this was clearly a dead-end event. We haven't seen
any disease beyond that cluster. If this truly had been transmitted in
any significant, meaningful way to public health, we would know all about
it. That is probably the more important fact of the matter," he said.
However, clusters of the disease among humans must be thoroughly investigated
-- even though such studies over a long period of time were exhausting
for the WHO and its partners.
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