Afghanistan pleads for help in bird-flu fight

War-torn Afghanistan today pleaded for protective clothing for its staff after the first possible cases of bird flu were detected, as Azerbaijan reported three people killed by the deadly disease.

The H5N1 strain of bird flu has killed or forced the slaughter of tens of millions of chickens and ducks across Asia since 2003, and recently spread to Europe, Africa and the Middle East.

It also has killed at least 98 people in Asia and Turkey since 2003, according to the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) latest tally, posted on its website early today.

Health officials fear H5N1 could evolve into a virus that can be transmitted easily between people and become a global pandemic. So far, human cases generally have been traced to direct contact with sick birds.

The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) said it hoped to know later today or early tomorrow whether five swab samples from backyard poultry farms in the Afghan capital, Kabul, and the eastern city of Jalalabad tested positive for the H5N1 strain of the disease.

The samples have already tested positive for H5, but the virus’ specific subtype was not known.

Dr Azizullah Esmoni, director of the husbandry and veterinary department of the Afghan Agriculture Ministry, said his department lacked the resources to buy protective outfits for its staff.

“We are asking for the international community to help us,” he said. “We don’t have any protective outfits, chemical disinfectant or flu vaccinations.”

Abdul Habib Nowruz, FAO’s director of migratory birds in Afghanistan, said the organisation was considering ways to help the government.

Each person working in bird flu-infected areas needs three or four protective outfits a day and each costs about $50 (€41.70), the equivalent of an Afghan government worker’s monthly salary, Nowruz said.

Afghanistan lies at a crossroads for migratory birds and its neighbours, including Iran and India, have already detected outbreaks. The FAO has long warned of the risk of the virus surfacing in the country.

The public veterinary system in the war-battered country remains weak and there’s still no quarantine system to check imported poultry at borders.

In Azerbaijan, officials said late yesterday that tests conducted by WHO officials had confirmed that three people from a district on the country’s Caspian Sea coast had died of bird flu.

The virus was discovered in wild birds in the west Asian country last month in an area along the Caspian Sea coast, and has spread to the north-east and the south-west, near the border with Iran.

Azerbaijan shares a short border with Turkey, where four children died recently of the disease.

In Burma, the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation said today it has provided $40,000 (€33,400) worth of assistance after the government said the H5N1 outbreak was found when 112 chickens died outside of Burma’s second largest city, Mandalay.

“The government needs support from UN agencies and the international community, and we will seek more donors for the funding,” Tang said.

Nearly 800 chickens have been slaughtered as a precaution, and experts were inspecting farms within a two-mile radius of where the infected birds were found, said Than Tun, director of the country’s livestock breeding and veterinary department.

He pledged that authorities would deal with any outbreak in a “transparent manner”.

There was no evidence, however, of human infection in Burma, he said.