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British to help Asian colleagues battle bird flu

British experts from the body that discovered the flu virus in 1933 will travel to southeast Asia to boost global cooperation on fighting bird flu and other new infections, the Medical Research Council (MRC) said yesterday.

Scientists from the MRC, Britain's main publicly funded bio-medical research organization, will go to China, Vietnam and Hong Kong to discuss research on infections with epidemic or pandemic potential before a global conference in December.

The move comes amid mounting fears of a bird flu pandemic after tests on Saturday showed the same deadly H5N1 strain of bird flu as that found in Turkey and Asia had infected ducks in Romania, confirming the virus has reached mainland Europe.

The MRC said the missions, which start on Oct. 23, were aimed at improving joint research on flu, SARS and HIV as well as cancer and neurosciences.

"The MRC is in a position to make a significant contribution because of our long-standing investment in flu, not least with the discovery of the flu virus by MRC scientists in 1933," the organization said in a statement.

Meanwhile, Vietnam yesterday unveiled an emergency plan to deal with a potential bird flu pandemic. The plan covers three scenarios, including one with millions of people infected by the H5N1 bird flu virus.

"The situation is very urgent," Deputy Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung told a national pandemic preparedness conference. "We do not exaggerate the threat. A pandemic, if it occurs, is forecast to be very serious."

The steps range from declaring a nationwide state of emergency and isolating everyone infected to culling all infected birds and banning the sale and transport of poultry from infected areas.

Dung said the country's priority was do everything possible to prevent a pandemic.

If it's unstoppable, then utmost efforts should be taken to minimize losses, he said.

He added that the government's political will and the public's participation would be key to successfully dealing with a pandemic.

Bird flu has killed more than 60 people and more than 100 million birds in Asia since it began ravaging regional poultry farms in late 2003. Vietnam has been hardest hit, with 43 human deaths.

The US has promised to help Indonesia fight bird flu through laboratory upgrades and by boosting surveillance, a senior official said yesterday.

Health Minister Siti Fadillah Supari, speaking after talks with visiting US Secretary of Health and Human Services Mike Leavitt, said the US government had thanked Indonesia for its efforts to combat the deadly virus.

"They will help us in lab improvements, surveillance and other aspects. They told us they are extremely ready to do that," Supari told reporters.

But she raised her concerns about the concentration of domestic chickens in urban areas, citing an example of central Jakarta alone where she said there were 200 places where large numbers of chickens were being raised.

"This is a very serious problem. At first I could not imagine such a thing ... They also can't," she said, referring to the US.

The US has pledged US$25 million to the region for training, supplies, lab equipment, village-based surveillance systems and public education.

There have been five confirmed cases in humans in Indonesia of the deadly H5N1 strain of avian flu since July, comprising three deaths and two people being treated.

Some health experts worry Indonesia is not showing enough urgency in tackling bird flu.

There has been virtually no mass culling of chickens even though the virus has been found in poultry in 22 provinces out of 33 in the country, killing more than 10 million domesticated birds.

In other developments, Thailand is planning to start bird-flu vaccine trials on humans next May and place stockpile orders if the tests are successful, the Bangkok Post reported yesterday.

The public health ministry has sought help from Japan's Osaka University to make a pilot batch of between 30,000 and 100,000 samples of the vaccine from a seed sample by the World Health Organization (WHO), the Post said.

The kingdom has already stockpiled about 725,000 doses of Tamiflu, an anti-viral drug used to treat influenza, the Thai health ministry said.
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