Deadly H5N1 Bird Flu Virus May Cost $1 Billion: Warned World Bank
The World Bank said on Wednesday that up to $1 billion would be needed over the next three years to tackle the spread of the deadly H5N1 bird flu virus.
On the final day of a three-day meeting at the World Health Organization (WHO), World Bank officials said it was crucial to stamp out the H5N1 disease at source in poultry as well as prepare countries for a potential human flu pandemic.
At the UN meeting, the director general of the World Health Organisation (WHO), Lee Jong-wook, warned that a large-scale worldwide bird flu outbreak was all but inevitable and would cause “incalculable misery”.
World Bank officials said the $1 billion figure may change.
“If — and we all hope we won’t have to — we face human to human transmission, all of these figures would be multiplied by several orders of magnitude,” said Fadia Saadah, sector manager for health, nutrition and population at the bank.
The priority under the bank’s package is funding “country-owned programmes”, mainly for controlling bird flu in poultry through vaccines and improved surveillance.
The virus remains hard for humans to catch. But scientists say that, like all influenza viruses, it is steadily mutating and could acquire the genetic changes that make it easy to pass among humans.
“The signs are clear that it is coming.”
So far, the human cost of the bird flu virus has been relatively small, with 60 fatalities reported since its discovery in 2003.
However, the WHO estimates that a large-scale worldwide outbreak could result in up to 7.4 million deaths.
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