WHO says bird flu fatality rate low

The fatality rate of avian flu cases in Turkey, otherwise known as bird flu, remains low in comparison to cases observed in Asia, the World Health Organization (WHO) noted on Tuesday. "Turkey is seeing a fatality rate of 20 percent which is lower than the fatality rate observed in Asia, which was around 58 percent," Cristiana Salvi, a spokeswoman for the world health body's mission in Turkey, said in the capital, Ankara, citing early detection and treatment as the primary cause. "There could be other factors which we are investigating as a lot of cases are still in hospital," she cautioned, however, noting the need for further observations. "We need to know how the cases progress," she said, adding of the 20 confirmed cases of the virus in the country, four had died. All but two of the cases involved young people or children below the age of 18, the WHO official said. Salvi's comments come as more than half the world's nations, including health and finance experts, gathered in Beijing for a two-day international conference, co-hosted by the World Bank, along with China and the European Union (EU), to raise more than a billion dollars to mitigate a possible bird flu pandemic - particularly amongst developing countries in Asia. The two-day conference is the second such gathering of its kind following a November meeting in Geneva, which agreed a three-year plan for tackling the spread of the disease. Speaking at the conference on Tuesday, bird flu experts called upon the world community to urgently amass a war chest to combat the virus and prepare nations should a pandemic strain emerge, Reuters reported. "There is a significant shortfall of funds in many affected countries...which will seriously hamper their prevention and control efforts," Qiao Zonghuai, the Chinese Deputy Foreign Minister, was quoted as telling the donors' conference in Beijing. "In the fight against avian influenza, no country can stay safe by looking the other way," he warned. Underscoring that urgency, Indonesia's health ministry said a toddler who died on Tuesday was being tested for bird flu days after his 13-year-old sister died of the H5N1 virus, according to local tests. A surviving sister was also being tested, the report said. On Monday, Turkish authorities confirmed that a fourth person, 12-year-old Fatma Ozcan, had indeed suffered from the H5N1 virus when she died on Sunday in hospital in the eastern city of Van, despite a mass culling of almost 1 million birds across the country by the authorities to contain the outbreak. The WHO says that new outbreaks in birds continue to be reported across the country. To date, poultry outbreaks of highly pathogenic H5N1 avian influenza have been confirmed in 12 of the country’s 81 provinces. Outbreaks in an additional 19 provinces are under investigation. Previously, Ozcan had tested negative for H5N1, but subsequent tests produced a different result, raising to 20 the tally of confirmed cases of human infection in the virus's current Turkish outbreak. According to media reports, bird flu has killed close to 80 people since 2003. Until this month, the deadly H5N1 strain of avian flu was known to have claimed human victims only in China and a handful of South East Asian states, although it has also been found in domestic birds in other countries, including Russia and several in eastern Europe.