China yesterday urged other governments to share more information about bird flu cases in people to prevent a human pandemic, and an official report said many residents in China's vast hinterland are uninformed about the disease.
Few developing countries other than China have submitted bird flu samples from humans to international organizations, the state-run China Daily newspaper said, citing an unidentified Agriculture Ministry official.
"The international community should further improve the information-sharing mechanism for the disease," the official was quoted as saying.
PHOTO: AP
The report came as health experts were attending a WHO conference in Geneva that was meant to produce guidelines for public health officials to stop a possible human pandemic in its early stages.
The WHO's Asia-Pacific regional director, Doctor Shigeru Omi, criticized China's Agriculture Ministry in December for refusing to share samples from animal outbreaks. The ministry did not respond.
China could reap an economic windfall if it creates an effective bird flu vaccine or treatment before foreign competitors that might be helped by access to its virus samples.
On Monday, China's official Xinhua News Agency quoted pandemic control expert Zhong Nanshan as saying bird flu has not been sufficiently publicized, especially in some rural areas.
"Some people there [in the countryside] are not alert for bird flu," Zhong said, who is also a delegate to the top panel that advises the country's parliament, currently in session.
He said people should realize that other animals, such as cats and pigs, may carry the virus.
China this week reported its ninth bird flu death out of 15 confirmed human cases.
Meanwhile US federal health officials announced plans on Monday for a second vaccine to protect people from bird flu because the virus spreading among birds in Asia, Africa and Europe is changing.
The US government has several million doses of an earlier bird flu vaccine, but it was based on a sample of virus taken from Vietnam in 2004. It is believed to have mutated enough since then that the form now circulating in Africa and Europe may be different, health officials said.
US Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt said on Monday that he had authorized the National Institutes of Health and the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to begin working on a second vaccine for humans.
Government flu experts would not speculate on whether the earlier vaccine would still protect most people. They said only that they believe it would be less effective than a new vaccine based on a more recent virus sample.
Health officials plan to base the second vaccine on a sample taken from Indonesia last year, said Ruben Donis, leader of the molecular genetics team at the CDC's influenza branch.
The virus circulating in Indonesia is related to the Vietnamese virus, but it is not a descendant and causes a different immune system response, he said.
A vaccine based on the Vietnamese virus would be protective for people in the Vietnam region, but less effective against viruses circulating elsewhere, Donis said.
He said that perhaps scientists will one day develop a vaccine that protects against several different forms of bird flu.
The US government is already spending US$250 million for about 8 million doses to protect against the Vietnamese version of bird flu.
Federal officials contracted with two companies -- Chiron Corp. and Sanofi Pasteur -- for those doses, and most already have been produced, said Bill Hall, a spokesman for Health and Human Services (HHS).
The second vaccine must be developed and tested, and HHS had no estimate for the cost of that work.
Margaret Chan, who is spearheading the WHO efforts against the virus, said it poses a greater challenge to the world than any previous infectious disease.
Poland on Monday confirmed its first outbreak of the disease, saying laboratory tests found that two wild swans died of the lethal strain.
Several cats have also tested positive for the deadly strain in Austria's first reported case of the disease spreading to an animal other than a bird, officials in that country said on Monday.
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