Bird Flu Goes Global

Now that bird flu has touched down in Britain, Romania, Russia and Turkey, fear is growing that the virus will sweep through Africa and the Middle East too. Last week, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (fao) said that the risk of a major outbreak had "markedly increased," warning that some countries in these regions were unprepared. "We would have to mobilize donors, the international community and the veterinary services massively to respond," fao chief veterinary officer Joseph Domenech told Time.

The fao suspects that wild birds could spread the lethal h5n1 virus — which can jump to humans and has killed at least 60 people in Asia so far, including a chicken farmer in Thailand last week — to domestic poultry in Africa. According to Ethiopian geneticist Tadelle Dessie, huge flocks migrating to lakes in the Rift Valley pose a threat. Where poultry is kept outdoors, the risks are great, he says. The fao fears wild birds wintering in Africa might bring the disease north to Europe next spring. But some scientists think the threat is exaggerated. "Everyone seems to think that it's going to happen today or tomorrow," says Lucille Blumberg of South Africa's National Institute for Communicable Diseases. "It's not."

All known human infections have been in Asia. An Indonesian father and son were hospitalized last week with symptoms of the disease, and China's health chief said the country would seal its borders if it found even a single case of human-to-human transmission. India and Taiwan have declared they intend to make generic copies of the anti-viral drug Tamiflu to be sure of having enough.

And authorities elsewhere are going on alert. Romania began vaccinating poultry workers and residents of the Danube delta. Quarantine officials in the U.K. suspected an imported parrot was carrying the h5n1 virus, but it died before it could infect local birds. In Africa, so far "the problem is speculative," says the fao's Domenech, "but nobody can say there is no risk."