November 7, 2005
A deadly new global pandemic of human influenza is inevitable and suffering will be "incalculable" unless the world is ready, the chief of the UN health agency told an international conference of health ministers.
"The signs are clear that is coming," said Lee Jong-wook, director general of the World Health Organization, noting that a changed avian flu virus caused the deadly "Spanish" flu pandemic that killed tens of millions of people in 1918-1919.
"We have been experiencing a relentless spread of avian flu" among migratory birds and domestic poultry, he said. Already the virulent H5N1 strain of avian flu, which appeared in Hong Kong in 1997, is killing birds in 15 countries of Europe and Asia
"It is only a matter of time before an avian flu virus most likely H5N1 - acquires the ability to be transmitted from human to human, sparking the outbreak of human pandemic influenza," Lee said.
"This is the time for every country to prepare their national action plan - and act on it," Lee said. "If we are unprepared, the next pandemic will cause incalculable human misery both directly from the loss of human life and indirectly through its widespread impact on security. No society will be exempt. No economy would be left unscathed."
Estimates of the number of people who would die in a new pandemic have varied widely between two million and 360 million, but WHO says a reasonable maximum would be 7.4 million.
The World Bank estimated that a pandemic could cost the world's richest nations $550 billion. A senior World Bank economist, Milan Brahmbhatt, told the meeting of 600 health experts and planners that a pandemic could cause world gross domestic product to drop by 2% or more.
More than 150 million chickens and other poultry have died or been culled, but that has not halted the spread of the disease to birds in central Asia, Russia and eastern Europe.
Samuel Jutzi of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation said that killing more chickens and other farm birds would come at a time when demand for animal protein has been growing "at an exponential rate."
