18 April 2006
New Pact Aims To Prepare Americas for Possible Avian Flu Outbreak
IDB-PAHO agreement calls for developing plans against potential pandemic
By Eric Green
Washington File Staff Writer
Washington -- Two inter-American agencies have signed an agreement for a program to develop preparedness plans to mitigate the socioeconomic effects of a possible influenza pandemic in Latin America and the Caribbean.
In an April 17 statement, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) said it had signed an agreement with the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) for a $200,000 operation to strengthen an early warning system against the potential outbreak of pandemic flu in the Americas.
The IDB said the economic and social costs of widespread influenza, in both animal and human forms, could be "enormous" for the region. An epidemic of the animal disease that has now occurred in birds in about 50 nations could cause losses in poultry production, international trade, tourism and other activities. A pandemic could lead to an increase in poverty among millions of rural families and small farmers, the IDB said.
The IDB-PAHO program will assess the risk of a pandemic and the level of preparedness of each country in the region, and will identify financial needs and methods available to help them develop and implement a plan against a possible avian influenza outbreak. The program also seeks to strengthen surveillance in animal and human health and sanitary regulations to reduce the chances of human infection.
According to a January 30 article posted on the IDB Web site, influenza experts consider the risk of avian flu in Latin America and the Caribbean to be "relatively low" at this time, as birds flying south from the United States are not believed to intermingle with birds heading to America from Siberia, where an outbreak occurred (among birds, not humans). But the current perception of low risk could change, given the presence of the H5N1 strain of the virus in Canadian waterfowl, the IDB said. (See related article on IDB Web site.)
According to international health authorities, some 25 European and Eurasian nations have detected the H5N1 virus since early 2006, with four in Africa, five in the Near East, four in South Asia and the remainder in East Asia where the epidemic began more than two years ago. Highly pathogenic H5N1 is an avian virus that has caused the death or destruction of hundreds of millions of birds in Asia and cost that region's poultry industry billions of dollars. (See related article.)
For additional information on avian influenza and efforts to combat it, see Bird Flu.
(The Washington File is a product of the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)
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