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Bird-Flu Fight to Cost $750 Mln a Year, UN Envoy Says

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  • Bird-Flu Fight to Cost $750 Mln a Year, UN Envoy Says



    Bird-Flu Fight to Cost $750 Mln a Year, UN Envoy Says (Update2)

    By Vesna Poljak

    Dec. 4 (Bloomberg) -- The global fight against bird flu needs as much as $750 million extra a year to stem its spread and prepare for any pandemic it spawns, the United Nations said.

    Outbreaks of the lethal H5N1 avian flu virus, which is constantly changing and may mutate to be easily transmissible between humans, could spark the next flu pandemic, David Nabarro, the UN's pandemic-flu coordinator, said in an e-mail.

    Between $500 million and $750 million a year is needed to fund efforts to monitor, manage and eradicate the virus and to bring animal and human health services to the standards sought by the World Organization for Animal Health and World Health Organization.

    ``Sustained financial provision will be necessary,'' Nabarro said. ``Humankind may have to live for years with the possibility that H5N1 will become the cause of the next influenza pandemic -- unless we develop the capacity to predict how this might happen and, better still, to neutralize it.''

    Disease trackers, health officials and representatives from aid agencies will meet in Bamako, the capital of West African nation of Mali, this week to raise more funds and discuss ways to improve pandemic preparations.

    The H5N1 virus is known to have infected 258 people in 10 countries, killing 154 of them, since 2003, according to the Geneva-based WHO. Millions could die if it becomes as contagious as seasonal flu.

    More Pledges Sought

    The international community will be asked to pledge between $1.31 billion and $1.58 billion in Bamako on Dec. 8 to fund activities for the next two to three years, Nabarro said. About a third of the extra financing is required in Africa, and UN agencies and partners need between $200 million and $300 million in 2007, he said.

    In January, almost $1.9 billion was pledged by donors at a conference in Beijing. Since then, the H5N1 avian influenza virus has infected animals in 38 new countries, resulting in human cases in four nations.

    ``The virus has spread further, and now has appeared in 55 countries on every continent of the eastern hemisphere, killing an estimated 250 million poultry, and highlighting the increasing challenge in controlling the virus and the urgency to act immediately to prevent further spreading of the disease,'' the World Bank said in a draft report dated Nov. 30.

    The largest increases in needs are in Sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East and North Africa, the Washington-based organization said. The H5N1 virus was found in poultry in Nigeria in February, and was later found in Niger, Egypt, Cameroon, Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast and Djibouti.

    Africa's Needs

    ``The African continent is much weaker economically and less structurally able to respond to the avian and human influenza threat, so effective implementation of integrated country programs will require significant grant funding,'' the World Bank said.

    At least $200 million will be needed annually to address poultry outbreaks in Indonesia and to prevent a further spread to other countries in the region and beyond, and to reduce the risk of a human pandemic, it said.

    More than half the 76 fatalities recorded this year have occurred in Indonesia, where the virus is reported to have killed about one person a month since January. H5N1 has been found in 30 of Indonesia's 33 provinces. The country needs assistance to speed poultry vaccination and to help fund compensation programs for farmers whose poultry were culled, the government's committee on avian and pandemic flu said in August.

    ``Compensation programs work best when you have them in place before disease breaks out, which can be difficult to do in poor countries where the extra finances and the expertise needed for fair and rapid payments to farmers and other poultry owners may be in short supply,'' Chris Delgado, a World Bank adviser on rural development, said in an e-mail.

    Pandemic Virus

    A pandemic can start when a novel influenza A-type virus, to which almost no one has natural immunity, emerges and begins spreading. Experts believe that a pandemic in 1918, which may have killed as many as 50 million people, began when an avian flu virus jumped to people from birds.

    A severe pandemic, similar to the one in 1918, may cause global economic losses of as much as $1.8 trillion, according to World Bank estimates.
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