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Taipei steps up fight against avian flu outbreak

The Taipei City Government said yesterday that storing an adequate amount of Tamiflu, the drug believed to be effective in combating avian flu, would not be enough to contain an outbreak of the disease.

"When preparing for a potential massive outbreak of the disease, we also need equipment such as breathing tanks," said Yen Mu-yong (顏慕庸), chief of the city's division for disease control and prevention.

Yen said the city has prepared 300 negative-pressure quarantine beds, with 199 of them located at Hoping Hospital. In case of an outbreak, the city would set up temporary disease-control centers in each administrative center, with public hospitals as the preferred option.

Yen made the comments at a conference in which city health officials presented their observations on Vietnam's disease control and prevention efforts based on a recent visit to that country.

Learning from Vietnam

Vietnam has had a total of 93 avian flu cases since 2003, with 42 human fatalities. None of the cases involved human-to-human transmission.

To contain the disease, the Vietnamese government has ordered the culling of 3 million chickens and advised the public against eating eggs during the outbreak. It also ordered that any bird found infected with the disease must be destroyed immediately.

Vietnam has not reported any new case of infection among humans since last October, or among birds since last November.

Yen said although Vietnam is a communist country, it has plenty of experience in terms of controlling contagious diseases, from which Taipei could learn from in order to be better equipped.

Yen said Vietnam's experience showed that having negative-pressure beds is not an essential requirement when combating the disease.

Educating the public

Although Taiwan has not yet reported any case of avian flu in humans, the public should be educated on how to prevent and control the disease, he said.

Health organizations in the towns and counties should also take the responsibility of raising public awareness, he said.

Last year lawmakers slammed the Department of Health for continuing to provide Tamiflu to Vietnam when the nation itself was struggling to prepare an adequate amount of the drug in case of an epidemic.

helping a neighbor

Department of Health Minister Hou Sheng-mou (侯盛茂) defended the government' s policy in helping combat the disease overseas, saying that there are 30,000 Taiwanese businessmen in Vietnam.

With the provision of Tamiflu from both the US' Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and Taiwan, the avian flu virus was successfully contained overseas and did not spread to Taiwan, he said.

According to information released by the WHO, countries wherein people have contracted the H5N1 strain of the avian flu virus include Indonesia, Vietnam, China, Iraq, Thailand, Cambodia and Turkey.

While the majority of these cases came from human contact with domesticated fowl, a couple of countries, such as Kuwait and Germany, have reported cases of H5N1 being detected in wild birds.

The CDC and WHO have provided a total of US$35 million to fight the disease around the world, city officials said.
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