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The world should have known better

It could turn out to be one of the costliest mistakes the global community has ever made — and it happened despite repeated warning, indeed pleading, from scientists and public health experts. From the time bird influenza caused by the deadly H5N1 viral strain exploded in South-East Asia (towards the end of 2003), the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), the World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE), and the World Health Organisation (WHO) have drawn attention to the virus' potential to acquire the ability to infect humans efficiently and thereby set off an influenza pandemic. The only way to avert such a crisis with enormous global ramifications was, they asserted, swiftly to root out the virus from domestic birds in the South-East Asian countries where it had shown up. All chicken and ducks in and around the location of every viral outbreak had to be slaughtered. But given that hundreds of thousands of poor farmers who depended on poultry for their livelihood needed to be adequately compensated if their birds were destroyed, culling on the scale demanded was beyond the capacity of the developing countries of the region. "Poorer countries urgently need financial and technical assistance," FAO's Assistant Director-General, Dr. He Changchui, told donor countries and organisations at a regional emergency meeting in Bangkok in February 2004.

A year after the February meeting, a meagre $18 million had been donated where, by FAO's reckoning, "hundreds of millions of dollars" were needed to improve the scientific infrastructure in Asian countries as well as restock flocks and improve farmers' husbandry methods. By July 2005, FAO and OIE appear to have scaled down their expectations, asserting that their strategy to control bird flu in Asia needed $100 million to support surveillance, diagnosis, and other control measures, including vaccination. It is not clear whether they got even that sum. Meanwhile, matters were spiralling out of control. Alarm bells went off in the scientific community when thousands of wild ducks that died at a lake in western China between May and July 2005 were found to have been infected with H5N1. By late July, the virus reached Siberia in Russia and Kazakhstan; in early August, Mongolia; and then Turkey and Romania. With this deadly spread being attributed to migratory birds, it is believed countries across Europe, Africa, West Asia, and South Asia, and some South-East Asian countries could be vulnerable. It is only now, with bird flu at their doorsteps, that wealthy European countries have woken up to the truth that what affects poor farmers half a world away has a direct bearing on their own lives and livelihood. At last, the Foreign Ministers of the European Union have now proclaimed bird influenza to be a global threat that demands a coordinated international response. One can only hope this realisation has not come a little too late.

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