UNITED NATIONS: Bird flu in poultry and wild birds spread to 60 nations but is entrenched only in six because of improved and faster responses, experts said Thursday. Despite those strides, the risk of a worldwide human-to-human pandemic remains as great today as it was when the hard-to-treat H5N1 flu strain first gained intense media attention in mid-2005, according to a new report by Dr. David Nabarro, the UN official coordinating the global fight against avian influenza, and World Bank officials. We think it will happen sometime, but we don t know when or where, Nabarro said. Only three years ago, H5N1 was found in poultry and wild birds in nine nations, the UN bird flu chief said. The increase is thought to have resulted more from trade in infected live birds than by transmission through wild birds, whose migrations change with weather. The upsurge in H5N1 bird flu outbreaks around the world has led to the slaughter of millions of birds across Asia since late 2003. It remains entrenched throughout Indonesia and in parts of Bangladesh, Vietnam, Egypt, Nigeria and China, posing a threat not just to those nations but the world, Nabarro said. A health expert outside the UN said Thursday there was reason for optimism even though the risk of pandemic remains as high as a couple years ago. I don t think one can ever say that the risk is lower, said Dr. Pascal James Imperato, a former New York City health commissioner who now directs public health at the State University of New York-Downstate Medical Center. But we have a wider margin of comfort, because this virus has not been able to commingle its genetic material with that of a human influenza virus and, in so doing, acquire the ability to be transmitted from person to person, Imperato said. Sporadic human-to-human transmission of the H5N1 strain has been reported in Hong Kong, Vietnam and Indonesia, but none of the cases have been proven, and officials determined there was no epidemiological significance because the spread was not sustained. The virus itself is continuously evolving as it moves from bird population to bird population, Nabarro said. The virus when it does enter into bird populations has to be dealt with quickly, otherwise it spreads and leads to widespread losses of bird lives. The report precedes a bird flu conference hosted by the government of India in New Delhi next week that is expected to draw health and agriculture officials from dozens of nations.
