Battling to prevent avian flu

Health authorities in Nepal are holding a series of emergency meetings to introduce tough preventive measures against avian influenza.

Although there has been no evidence of bird flu in the Himalayan kingdom to date, a confirmed outbreak of the disease among poultry in the Indian states of Maharashtra and Gujarat on 19 February has led to a ban on poultry imports from India.

Margarita Ronderos, epidemiologist at the World Health Organization (WHO), warned on 26 February that Nepal was vulnerable to avian influenza: Nepal depends heavily on India for its poultry, brought across 1,700 km of open border shared between the two countries.

“We have appealed to all poultry dealers and consumers to ensure that they do not bring in poultry from India for the sake of public health,” said Narayan Ghimire, chief of the monitoring and evaluation section of the government’s Directorate of Livestock Services.

Although the government has set up 24 quarantine posts along the border, because the long border is open and free of controls, preventing the disease moving to Nepal will be a challenge, health officials say.

More than 90 people have died of the H5N1 strain of bird flu since the disease's resurgence in December 2003 - most of them in South East Asia. Experts say that cross-infection to humans is still relatively rare and usually occurs where people have been in close contact with infected birds.

In China, a nine-year-old girl and a woman farmer remain in critical condition with H5N1, the WHO said on Monday. It also confirmed that an Indonesian woman who died last week was the 20th Indonesian to have been killed by the virus.

Nepali authorities have given top priority to investigating every reported poultry death in the country through veterinary laboratories in the six main cities, including the capital.

Scare stories in some Nepali newspapers have led to widespread fear of the disease. Chicken consumption has nose-dived, sending the commercial poultry business into a crisis, and most restaurants in the capital are reported to have already removed chicken from the menu.