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Hanoi, Vietnam. Midsize traders and farms that sell poultry to small farmers could act as avian flu transmission hubs and there needs to be to better biosecurity at that level, a top United Nations expert said on Tuesday.

Bird flu outbreaks have generally been dealt with by culling birds, but health authorities are now trying to look up the supply chain to identify possible sources of infection, said David Nabarro, the UN’s senior coordinator for avian and pandemic flu.

“We are finding that if we have a much clearer understanding of the patterns of movement of the virus, and in particular build-up points, we can then do much more sophisticated control strategies that have less economic damage for poorer people and more impact,” he said in a telephone interview from Geneva.

“It’s the medium-sized commercial poultry traders who have yet to introduce good quality biosecurity that are the ones on whom we are focusing most of our attention these days,” Nabarro said, adding that evidence from Indonesia and Egypt suggested that this layer of the industry was significant.

Nabarro is participating remotely in the two-day International Ministerial Conference on Animal and Pandemic Influenza that started in Hanoi on Tuesday. He could not attend in person because of flight cancellations due to the ash cloud over Europe.

Since 2003 the H5N1 strain of bird flu has infected a confirmed 493 people and killed 292, or nearly 60 percent. Most of the deaths have been in Asia.

Almost all of these infections were believed to have taken place directly from birds to humans, but health experts fear the virus could mutate to a form that could be easily transmitted human-to-human, sparking a deadly global pandemic.

There have been two sizeable clusters so far — one in which eight family members died on the Indonesian island of Sumatra in 2006 and another in Turkey in which eight people were infected and four died.

In the Sumatra case, the virus went on for two generations and then stopped — a 37-year-old woman was believed to have infected her 10-year-old nephew, who went on to infect his father.

Another smaller probable case of human-to-human transmission occurred in Thailand in 2004, where a mother died after tending to her sick daughter for hours.

The conference in Hanoi has brought together hundreds of officials from around the world and Nabarro said they would assess avian influenza prevention and look at systems for pandemic response.



Reuters