UN bird flu chief sees global battle plan

By Stephanie Nebehay

GENEVA - The senior U.N. coordinator for avian and human influenza, David Nabarro, said on Sunday he expects health and veterinary officials to draw up a sweeping global battle plan against the disease this week.

A global program would require investing in veterinary services, boosting human disease surveillance, scientific cooperation on vaccine development as well as negotiations with drug companies on access to existing antivirals, he said.

Speaking on the eve of talks in Geneva on the disease that has killed more than 60 people in Asia, Nabarro also said that as part of the plan, the World Bank would propose setting up a fund to help both countries and agencies respond to the crisis.

Some 400 health and veterinary officials have converged on Geneva for the three-day meeting by international agencies to hammer out a strategy against bird flu and to stop the deadly H5N1 virus triggering a human pandemic that could kill millions.

"I think there is a reasonably good chance ... that people will congeal around a set of basic principles and elements for what will become an international program which can then be presented to the donor community over the next couple of months," Nabarro told Reuters in an interview in his home.

"The actual pledging, I understand, will take place in the new year... That is definitely in the plans," he added.

Jim Adams, the World Bank‘s chief for operations policy and country services who will make a financial presentation to the talks on Wednesday, has said a trust fund would require initial donations of $300 million to $500 million to help countries set up programs.

"Whether or not it will be a trust fund has to be decided... The World Bank is describing a flexible set of instruments," Nabarro said.

"We have to establish a system that responds to countries who are requiring assistance and also respond to political imperatives of donor nations. So we get a system that is incredibly responsive and at the same time flexible," he said.

Nabarro, a former senior World Health Organization (WHO) official named by U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan to the new post in late September, noted that three days was a short period to meet such a huge challenge.

"We need to try to reach general agreement on the shape of the program within the next three days," he said. "I think it is quite tricky. But we‘ve got no alternative but to try."

Preliminary discussions on establishing regional stockpiles of vaccines and antivirals were expected, according to Nabarro.

But the Briton cautioned that "difficult dilemmas" would need to be resolved over time on where the stockpiles would be placed and who would decide when they should be used.

The deadly H5N1 virus is known to have killed 63 people in four Asian countries and led to the culling of 150 million birds worldwide. It has recently been detected in birds in eastern Europe and experts expect it to reach the Middle East and Africa in the near future.

"We‘ve got to be ready for the bird flu epidemic extending into the Middle East and Africa. We just hope that they are stamped out as effectively as they appear to have been in some isolated European outbreaks," Nabarro said.

"This is a global thing. There is no reason to think that the pandemic will start in countries currently affected by avian influenza, although obviously that is where minds are most focused," he said.

But Nabarro said that recent initiatives by ASEAN countries, the United States, Australia and Canada had contributed to a "considerable degree of political energy" around the issue.

"We‘ve got to start networking to get ourselves ready to do things right, because the politicians are expecting it of us," he said.

Nabarro, who was in China for talks 10 days ago, also said that Chinese officials appeared committed to playing a "very overt and central role" in the fight against bird flu.

Chinese state media said on Sunday that all poultry in the northeast province of Liaoning would be slaughtered after 9,000 birds died in the vast country‘s fourth outbreak in a month.

"The Chinese authorities are absolutely determined to be as clear and as open about what is happening as they can," Nabarro said.

source: herald news