The EU yesterday said the bird flu virus found in Turkish poultry was the H5N1 strain that scientists worry might mutate into a human virus and spark a pandemic.
"We have received now confirmation that the virus found in Turkey is an avian flu H5N1 virus," said EU Health Commissioner Markos Kyprianou. "There is a direct relationship with viruses found in Russia, Mongolia and China."
The H5N1 strain which has killed more than 60 people in Asia since 2003.
PHOTO: AP
Kyprianou said precautionary measures being assessed are to warn people traveling to countries where the disease has been diagnosed to avoid "going to farms, coming in contact with wild birds and so on."
ROMANIA
The EU also said tests overnight on samples from birds in Romania have found bird flu and narrowed the strain to an H5 type virus, but have so far been unable to narrow it further.
The EU yesterday banned the import of live birds, poultry meat and feathers from Romania for at least six months. A ban was imposed earlier this week on Turkey.
Romania's chief veterinarian Ion Agafitei said that scientists detected the H5 avian influenza virus in samples taken from three ducks found in the Danube delta.
"We eventually isolated the avian flu virus in the samples taken from the three ducks," Agafitei said.
The Danube delta contains Europe's largest wetlands and is a major migratory area for wild birds coming from Russia, Scandinavia, Poland and Germany. The birds mainly move to warmer areas in North Africa including the Nile delta for winter.
Officials in Romania have announced plans to slaughter thousands of birds to prevent the disease from spreading.
VIETNAM
Vietnam joined the UN yesterday in launching a US$6.8 million joint program to combat bird flu over the winter months -- when the majority of the country's fatalities from the illness have occurred in past years.
The agreement is the first of its kind and includes donors such as the US, Europe and the World Bank. About US$2.1 million has been secured so far for a plan that will stretch over the next six months, said Jordan Ryan, head of the UN Development Program in Vietnam.
The plan aims to strengthen surveillance and rapid response systems, vaccinate poultry, and complete the country's national emergency preparedness plan to deal with a bird flu epidemic.
"This is a potential country in the world where this disease can either be stopped or where it will emanate throughout the world," Ryan said.
"I think the prime minister and others do not want Vietnam to be seen as the country where this started," he said.
HONG KONG
Hong Kong officials and emergency services have held a secret dress rehearsal to prepare for a feared global outbreak of bird flu, Chief Executive Donald Tsang (曾蔭權) said yesterday.
Tsang said extensive contingency plans had been drawn up for an outbreak which he described as "almost inevitable" and "only a matter of time."
A drill to test the reaction of emergency services and government departments had already been held and another one would be staged soon drawing on the lessons of the first, Tsang told reporters. He did not give details of when the rehearsal was staged or what it involved during the briefing.
Hong Kong was the scene of the first bird flu outbreak of modern times to claim human lives when six people died and 18 were infected during an outbreak in 1997.
FLU SHOTS
Meanwhile, to head off a global pandemic of avian flu, some scientists are advancing a novel strategy: that poultry workers and farmers in Asia get the same vaccine that Americans and Europeans are given to protect against conventional flu. The goal, these virologists say, is to keep the Asians from becoming "mixing vessels" for human and bird strains.
"The idea is simple," said Dr. Daniel Perez, a flu virus expert at the University of Maryland.
If a poultry worker is unlucky enough to catch both conventional and avian flu, Perez said, the fear is that the human and bird viruses will mix in a process called reassortment. The mixing might create a virus that would spread easily from human to human, leading to a global pandemic of avian flu.
But if the workers are vaccinated against human influenza, he said, "they can't catch it, so you won't get reassortment."
Although US public health experts and officials praised the idea in the abstract, they said it would be hard, if not impossible, to carry out because it could require diverting millions of flu shots that Americans and Europeans are expecting to protect them this winter.
Giving the shots to anyone likely to be near infected poultry "makes sense from a science perspective," said Thomas Skinner, a spokesman for the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Dr. Klaus Stoehr, head of the WHO's global influenza program, said the proposal was "intriguing, but might not do the trick."
Stoehr said that only one of the 117 people known to have caught the H5N1 strain since December 2003 was a poultry worker. Most victims, he said, were young and lived in rural areas. Vaccinating everyone in those risk groups in Vietnam and Indonesia, where cases are increasing, would consume all the flu vaccine in the world and cost a minimum of US$3 billion, he said.
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