The bird flu ravaging several east Asian countries — and which has been blamed for the deaths of at least three Vietnamese people — could precipitate a more serious global health crisis than Sars if it spreads by human contact, the World Health Organisation warned on Wednesday.
The alarm came as Vietnam reported two more suspected cases and suggested that pigs could be involved in the transmission of the virus from chickens to humans. Millions of chickens and ducks have died or are being killed in Vietnam, Japan and South Korea, in efforts to contain the outbreak.
The WHO’s regional coordinator, Peter Cordingley, said no chances could be taken with the illness. ”[It will be] a bigger potential problem than Sars because we don’t have any defences against the disease,” he said. If it latched on to a human influenza virus it could cause serious damage on a global scale, he added.
Severe acute respiratory syndrome killed almost 800 people and infected more than 8 000 last year. It began to recur last month in southern China, where it originated.
Cordingley stressed that there was no evidence bird flu had started to spread through human contact, and there was no risk from eating either properly cooked poultry or eggs from infected birds.
The WHO confirmed on Tuesday that three Vietnamese people had died from the illness and that tests were being conducted on a further six people who had died in similar circumstances.
Veronica Chan, a parasite expert at the University of the Philippines, told Reuters: ”There is no protection from the new strain of influenza virus, so it’s going to cause a big epidemic.”
”The pandemics that occurred in the 20th century were really devastating, especially the Spanish flu. We had that in 1918 and 40-million died of that. We should worry.”
Dr Chan said a pandemic could start if a person with flu caught the avian strain of the illness. ”The bird and the human influenza can re-sort their genetic components and come out with progenies, meaning products or a new virus,” she said.
Bird flu has killed more than a million chickens in Vietnam, and led to the slaughter of 1,1-million chickens and ducks in South Korea. More than 10 000 chickens have died from the disease in Japan, and thousands more are to be killed. Hong Kong and Cambodia have banned poultry imports from the affected countries. – Guardian Unlimited Â