The Hindu : National : More funds needed to fight avian influenza: Manmohan

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Friday, Dec 07, 2007
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More funds needed to fight avian influenza: Manmohan

Special Correspondent

“Best strategy is to control the disease at animal level ”

Countries must work to deal with the problem
Conditions in developing countries were different

NEW DELHI: Emphasising the threat posed by avian influenza on the health front as well as on the economy, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Wednesday called for greater funding support at the international level to ensure that the efforts to deal with the problem were more effective.

“Many pledges were made at the Beijing Conference in January 2006 as well as at Bamako to support avian influenza control and preparedness. Many of these pledges have been fulfilled and generated the resources required for combating avian influenza. However, we need more funding support,” he said.

Speaking at an international ministerial conference on avian and pandemic influenza organised by the Union Ministries of Agriculture and Health, he pointed out that the best available strategy was to control the disease at the animal level itself.

“We do not yet know the future behaviour of a mutated influenza virus that impacts human health. But we do know that once human to human transmission is established there would be a very short time lag before it spreads and impacts every part of the globe. The window of opportunity to take action is therefore here and now.”

Urging that all countries work in unison in dealing with the problem, he said there was a need to recognise that no single formula would apply to all. There was a need to be sensitive to national capabilities and capacities and build them where necessary through international efforts. Also, the conditions in developing countries were different from those in developed countries.

In India, for instance, preventive bio-safety measures constituted a challenge for health administrators since, apart from large commercial poultry farms, there were widespread holdings of backyard poultry and in poorer households the problem was compounded as the family’s living space including kitchen was shared by poultry, he said.

Dr. Singh urged that the responses to such pandemics should not be strait-jacketed into “organisational silos” as independent missions and programmes that focused on specific diseases often replicated the work of other such programmes, leading to multiplication of efforts, staff and funding and resulted in adoption of a piece-meal approach, even while there was a need to address the problems of public health and disease control in a holistic manner.

“Even as specialists focus on avian flu or HIV/AIDS or TB or any other such diseases, and gather at conferences like these, we must link our efforts across disease vectors and institutional silos. As professionals you may focus on a specific problem. However, as government, we must take a more comprehensive and holistic approach.”

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