U.N. health chief offers grim bird-flu message

Avian flu will mutate and become transmissible by humans and the world has no time to waste to stop it becoming a pandemic, the head of the U.N. World Health Organization said  Thursday.

Lee Jong-wook, a South Korean doctor, delivered his stark warning as the United States worked to rally states behind a new U.S. plan to fight the disease, which has already killed more than 60 people in Asia and spread to Russia and Europe.

“Human influenza is coming, we know that, and no government, no leaders can afford to be caught off-guard,” Lee said.

“We must pounce on human pandemic outbreaks with all medicines at our disposal and at the earliest possible moment,” he told a news conference in New York.

“When the pandemic starts, it is simply too late.”

President Bush unveiled a plan at the United Nations Wednesday under which countries and international agencies would pool resources and expertise to fight bird flu.

His International Partnership on Avian and Pandemic Influenza reflects growing concern that avian flu could becomes a human pandemic, a threat Bush said the world must not allow.

On Thursday, the U.S. government announced that it would begin stockpiling $100 million worth of inoculations of an experimental bird flu vaccine. The new contract with French vaccine maker Sanofi-Pasteur marks a major scale-up in U.S. preparation for the possibility that the virus could spark an influenza pandemic.

Worse threat to world than HIV
Andrew Natsios, head of the U.S. Agency for International Development, said the risk of bird flu was even worse than HIV/AIDS. He urged nations to cooperate fully and not to hide knowledge of the disease when it struck.

“The consequences for the global economy could be massive,” Natsios told a small group of reporters. “Without international and national responses we will not stop the disease.”

Most of the people killed in Asia since 2003 caught the virus from infected birds. Health experts say the greatest worry is that the highly pathogenic strain of the disease known as H5N1 could mutate and become transmissible between people.

Lee said H5N1 “will acquire this capability — it’s just an issue of timing.” Countries far from heavily hit Southeast Asian states would not be safe because the disease was spreading through migratory wildfowl, Lee added.

He urged states like Japan, Switzerland and France with stockpiles of anti-flu drugs to make medicines available for international emergencies.

Paula Dobriansky, Under Secretary of State for Democracy and Global Affairs, said the United States would convene a senior officials meeting in Washington soon to coordinate policy. Canada will host a global health ministers in the coming weeks to support the U.S. initiative, she said.

Partner countries and agencies include Argentina, Australia, Britain, Canada, China, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore and Russia, as well as WHO, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization and UNICEF, Dobriansky said.