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Annan Warns Bird Flu Could "Spin Out of Control"

November 5, 2005

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The bird flu could "spin out of control" claiming millions of lives, United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan warned. He called for urgent, collective action to prevent the deadly avian influenza from spiraling into a pandemic.

"Whatever we may not know about the future course of H5N1, we do know this: once human-to-human transmission has been established, we would have only a matter of weeks to lock down the spread before it spins out of control," he told a New York gathering of experts who are meeting to discuss the threat bird flu poses to humans.

Annan stressed that merely stockpiling antiviral medicines "does not constitute a strategy." He conceded that no one knows whether H5N1 will acquire the ability to spread from human to human.

"But we do know what a human pandemic is," he told the Time Global Health Summit."We do know what happens when millions of people die, and millions more are infected, when health systems are overburdened and overwhelmed, when families, communities and whole societies are devastated, when transport and trade, education and other services are disrupted or cease to function, When the economic and social progress of nations risks being reversed."

Experts at the meeting have called for a series of measures from health to economic, including stockpiling vaccines, shoring up economies of affected nations and quickly isolating affected areas, should the deadly avian virus mutate.

They also suggested establishing an international fund to help the poor nations take preventive measures and to provide compensation to producers for culled poultry.

"A threat like a flu pandemic cannot be addressed by one organization, one group of countries, one sector or one profession," Annan said. "It presents us with an extraordinary collective challenge and it calls for an extraordinary collective effort."

H5N1, the deadly virus, first infected poultry and has now been found in birds in Europe. Going by the previous outbreaks which killed millions, the next episode could be much more deadly in the days of globalization and fast travel, say experts.

The experts also called for greater investments in veterinary infrastructure to halt spread of virus among the birds.

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