FAO calls for heightened bird flu vigilance

The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization FAO today urged heightened readiness and surveillance against a possible major resurgence of the H5N1 Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza virus. Signs that a mutant strain of the deadly Bird Flu virus is spreading in Asia and beyond provoked the call. A senior officer in FAO’s animal health service and head of the FAO’s bird flu emergency response team, Jan Slingenbergh told us the call for greater vigilance is a necessary precaution. “We know that systems are in place – have been in place for the past five or six years,” said Slingenbergh. “It’s just that, now, we fell this extra attention is justified.”

Figures from the World Health Organization show The H5N1 virus has infected 565 people since it first appeared in 2003, killing 331 of them. The latest death occurred earlier this month in Cambodia, which has registered eight cases of human infection this year – all of them fatal. Since 2003 H5N1 has killed or forced the culling of more than 400 million domestic poultry and caused an estimated $20 billion of economic damage across the globe before it was eliminated from most of the 63 countries infected at its peak in 2006. However, the virus remained endemic in six nations, although the number of outbreaks in domestic poultry and wild bird populations shrank steadily from an annual peak of 4000 to just 302 in mid 2008. But outbreaks have risen progressively since, with almost 800 cases recorded in 2010-2011. Listen