UNITED NATIONS, April 29: The international community is ill-equipped to handle a ‘flu pandemic’, which is becoming imminent as time goes by, the head of the United Nations health agency warned industrialised countries on Friday.
“We must act as a global community. We must help develop comprehensive national preparedness plans, strengthen surveillance systems, and build laboratory networks,” World Health Organisation Director-General Lee Jong-wook told health ministers of the G8 countries in Moscow.
“In a sense, the threat of human pandemic influenza is a ‘stress test’ for the international community,” he said, noting that in just three months since February the potentially deadly H5N1 bird flu virus had spread to 34 more countries, in Africa, Asia, Europe and the Middle East, several of them in the world’s most densely populated and deprived areas.
“Are we in good shape to face a potential global disaster? This question has to be asked again and again by every member state and international organisation. It is a disgrace if we fail to recognise that we are in bad shape, and fail to put things right,” he warned, voicing the hope that the upcoming Moscow G8 summit ‘will be a watershed for the global control of communicable diseases’.
Although there have been millions of deaths among birds worldwide, there have so far only been 205 human cases — 113 of them fatal — since Dec 2003, when the first case was detected in Southeast Asia.
