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WHO prepares defenses against flu pandemic threat

GENEVA (Reuters) - The global spread of bird flu is unprecedented and the threat of a human pandemic will not go away, but the world is not totally defenseless, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Monday. Speaking at the start of a three-day meeting of experts called to sharpen the global response to any human outbreak, the WHO's top influenza official said the first thing would be to try to stamp it out before it really took hold.

If that failed, the next move would be to attempt to curtail its spread and avoid the high death toll and economic devastation that a full blown pandemic would bring, said Margaret Chan. "When a notoriously unpredictable virus like the influenza virus is given unprecedented opportunities, we must be prepared to see some surprises," she said in opening remarks to the meeting at the WHO headquarters in Geneva. "But we are not without defenses, if we act collectively right now," she added. Some 30 epidemiologists, virologists, and laboratory experts will take part in the talks, along with health officials from affected countries. The aim is to further hone the WHO's draft "pandemic containment strategy", which calls for using quarantines and Swiss firm Roche's antiviral Tamiflu in the frontline against the threat.

H5N1 has killed birds in more than 30 countries stretching from South Korea to France and into Nigeria. It has spread to 15 new countries in the past month and infected 174 people since 2003, killing 94 of them. "Events in recent weeks justify our concern," said Chan. Scientists say the deadly virus is mutating steadily and may eventually acquire the changes it needs to be easily transmitted from human to human. Because people lack any immunity to it, it could sweep the world in a matter of weeks or months, killing millions and bringing economies to their knees. Even if a pandemic cannot be stopped, public health interventions such as quarantines might buy time to allow countries to tighten their control measures, the WHO says.

Source: http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=scienceNews&storyID=2006-03-06T112855Z_01_L06629947_RTRUKOC_0_US-BIRDFLU-WHO-TALKS.xml