Concern over African bird-flu spread

The deadly H5N1 strain of bird flu was today confirmed in a third African country, deepening experts’ fears that the disease is becoming endemic on the poor, ill-equipped continent and that it may already be far more widespread than reported.

Poor veterinary services, a lack of laboratories to detect the disease, farmers’ lack of knowledge about bird flu and their fears that they will not be adequately compensated if they report it in their poultry could be masking the true extent of H5N1’s spread in Africa, said animal health experts gathered in Paris.

Ilaria Capua, chief of the Italian laboratory that identified H5N1 in domestic ducks in Niger, said she feared that the new cases are “just the prelude to the virus becoming endemic in Africa, with all the commerce there is in rural poultry, all the trading there is in Africa”.

“Given the sort of agriculture they have and given the hygienic standards they have in animal farming, I believe that this is just the start,” she said.

Other experts at the Paris conference agreed that H5N1’s spread in Africa is very worrisome, as is the likelihood that its confirmed presence in Niger, its southern neighbour Nigeria and in Egypt are but the tip of the problem.

“We have to understand that all of Africa is infected,” Nikolai Vlasov, deputy chief of Russia’s veterinary service, said. “The spread of the virus is wider than we can see from newspapers.”

H5N1 is believed to have spread unchecked in Nigeria before it was identified, and Nigeria’s efforts to contain it have been hampered by lack of resources and information.

In Niger, H5N1 was confirmed in domestic ducks in Magaria, close to the Nigerian border, and in Dan Barde, said Maria Zampaglione of the Paris-based World Organisation for Animal Health, known by its French acronym OIE.

OIE director Bernard Vallat said that all of Nigeria’s neighbours – which aside from Niger include Benin, Cameroon and Chad – “are under a very big threat”.

“We know that the virus in Nigeria has invaded a large part of the country. The measures of confinement were not taken and transparency was not applied from the beginning,” said.

He added that H5N1 was an immediate threat to rural Africans who depend on their poultry for survival. More broadly, he said the more the disease spreads, the greater chance of it “transforming itself into a virus more dangerous for mankind”.

Scientists fear that lethal H5N1 avian influenza could mutate into a form easily transmitted among humans, sparking a pandemic.

Almost all human deaths from bird flu have been linked to contact with infected birds. The UN health agency today raised its tally of officially confirmed human cases by three to 173, of which 93 were fatal.

In birds, the disease has leapt from Asia to Europe and Africa.

Experts at the Paris conference, which brought together veterinary officials from Europe and the Middle East, warned of large gaps in their knowledge about how the virus is spreading, particularly the likely role that wild birds are playing.

“There’s this big enormous black hole about wild birds that we know absolutely nothing about,” said Capua, head of the laboratory in Padua, Italy.

She said a major concern is that the disease could spread from African poultry to wild birds, and then be carried to other parts of the globe as they migrate.

“Can you imagine the virus getting in the wild bird population in Africa? Where’s it going to go? What’s it going to do? Is it going to be carried back?” she asked.

She added that Europe could find itself “under a double machine gun” of potential infection from wild birds migrating southward in winter and northward in spring.

“It’s a mess. I mean the only hope we have is that it is not going to be the new pandemic virus,” she said.

Bernard Van Goethem, the European Commission’s director for animal health, said signs suggest that the disease spread to Europe by wild birds that sought to escape this year’s unusually harsh winter in Russia and other eastern European countries.

Among birds that the cold drove southward were swans, spotted this year on the Italian island of Sicily for the first time in 15 years, he said.

But he said the European Union is particularly well geared to combat the disease, evidenced by the fact that it has been able to detect H5N1 in dead wild birds first, enabling officials to take early measures to prevent a wide spread of the virus to commercial poultry, where the economic effects are already being felt.

France on Saturday reported the EU’s first case of H5N1 on a commercial poultry farm and said today that 20 countries have imposed partial or total bans on imports of its poultry.

The outbreak on a turkey farm was in a zone of southeast France that was already under heightened surveillance because H5N1 had been found there in dead wild ducks.