Bird flu can be contained
Research carried out in London and Atlanta shows that although bird flu could affect half the world’s population with a 50% mortality rate, the right actions taken in the first three months could limit the number of cases to less than 100 in the first two months. The key to containing an outbreak is treating the first people infected and those who may have come in contact with them as soon as possible. To do this, the World Health Organisation (WHO) needs to have 3 million doses of the anti-viral drug Tamiflu available to use anywhere in the world and good surveillance systems at local level, particularly in at-risk countries in south-east Asia, for fast detection of the virus’s emergence and accurate diagnosis.
Currently the WHO has only 120 000 doses of Tamiflu available, and timely reporting and treating of cases of suspected bird flu in humans in Asia has often not happened.
It’s good to see a chance of beating a bird flu epidemic (which experts increasingly state is not a question of “if”, but of “when”), but there is a lot needs to be done by governments around the world to make it possible.