Africa needs $760 mn to fight bird flu- Report

Vienna, June 8: Africa needs 760 million dollar to fight bird flu over the next three years, about three times as much as donors pencilled into their 1.9 billion dollar pledge made in January, the African Union and aid organisations have said.

The pledge made at a donors conference in Beijing did not assume bird flu would break out in Africa, according to a study by the AU, the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and the World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE) presented in Vienna.

But eight African countries have reported the virus since February, and OIE Director General Bernard Vallat yesterday told Reuters on the sidelines of a Vienna conference of bird flu coordinators that this increased the funds needed significantly.

''During the Beijing conference, Africa was not yet infected,'' Vallat said in an interview. ''In Beijing the cost was calculated only for prevention. But when a country is infected, the cost is multiplied but at leat three or four.'' Most funds will be needed to bolster the surveillance and response capacity of national health systems in Africa and to underpin compensation of farmers whose poultry is killed, the study found.

It predicts the countries in need of most money will be Southe Afrcia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Ethiopia.

The senior officials at the Vienna conference did not pledge additional funds for Africa but agreed to hold another pledging conference on the continent later this year to agree on how much in additional funds they could dole out, Vallat said.

The main aim of the Vienna meeting was to take stock of the funding flows since the Beijing conference. The World Bank found that by the end of April, only less than a sixth -- 286 million dollar -- had really been spent yet.

US Undersecretary Paula Dobriansky, top US official at the meeting, told a briefing: ''This meeting has been a strong ...appeal to those who have not fufilled their commitments.'' Since the Beijing conference, the H5N1 avian influenza virus has spread out of Asia, across Europe and into Africa. It has not always affected commercial poultry but has killed or forced the culling of tens of millions of more birds.

In January, the virus had killed 79 people, all of them in Asia. Now it has infected at least 224 people in 10 countries, and killed 127 of them, according to the World Health Organization.

Experts fear it could mutate at any time into a strain that could pass easily from one person to another, sparking a pandemic that would travel around the globe in weeks or months.

Reuters