Bird flu: Myanmar's junta reaches
out By Marwaan Macan-Markar
Myanmar's reclusive ruling military junta
has come up against resistance from an unlikely
opponent - the avian-flu virus.
This
week's public confirmation by Myanmar that it is
the latest country in the region to be hit by the
deadly H5N1 virus marked a notable departure from
the insularity of a regime that has ruled the
country with an iron grip since 1962. Earlier the military-run
government had denied its
poultry flocks had been infected by the virus.
A request by the junta for assistance from
the Food and Agriculture Organization is winning
early praise from the United Nations agency. "We
are pleased that the government of Myanmar
reported the outbreak to FAO and has sought
verification of the virus from labs outside the
country," said Laurence Gleeson, senior
animal-health officer at the FAO's Asia-Pacific
regional office in Bangkok.
Part of this
openness also includes Yangon permitting an FAO
animal-health expert to visit the areas where the
avian-influenza cases in the poultry population
were detected, around the town of Mandalay, some
700 kilometers north of Yangon, and the
neighboring Sagaing division.
"We are
looking for epidemiological traces of the virus,
where it came from and the controls that need to
be in place to contain its spread," said Gleeson,
who also confirmed that tests conducted last
Thursday had proved that Myanmar had the lethal
H5N1 virus.
Early studies conducted by the
FAO have documented a 40% mortality rate in
Myanmar's infected flocks, or some 120 dead birds
in a chicken farm that had 280 birds in the
Pyigyidagun township in Mandalay. Two farms
adjacent to it, one of which has 450 chickens, had
not been affected. In the Sagaing division,
according to the FAO, an estimated 10% of the
poultry population in three chicken farms that had
a total of 12,000 birds had died.
But it
was only late last week that Myanmar's citizens
learned of the lethal virus hitting their back
yards, after the issue was kept under a cloak of
official secrecy for nearly four days. The tightly
controlled state-run media revealed
uncharacteristically candid accounts of the damage
that had been caused - more than 5,000 birds had
been culled and a ban was in place on the sale of
chickens and poultry products in the Mandalay
area. An appeal was also made for the public to
report any more bird-flu outbreaks.
The
response by the State Peace and Development
Council (SPDC), as the military regime is
officially known, to the presence of the dead
chickens is already being viewed by analysts in
the region as an occasion for Yangon to re-engage
with its neighbors and the international
community.
Health experts say openness
from Myanmar is crucial for its neighbors that
have been hit by bird flu or are concerned about a
domestic outbreak to take preventive action.
Thailand, which shares a 2,100km border with
Myanmar, tops this list. At least 14 people have
died from the virus and tens of thousands of
chickens have been culled or died since bird flu
was first reported in Thailand in early 2004.
Other Southeast Asian nations that have
been hit include Vietnam, where 42 people have
been killed, Indonesia, where there have been 22
reported deaths, and Cambodia, where four people
have died. China has reported four human
fatalities from bird flu since 2005. Bird flu,
which was first detected in Southeast Asia in the
winter of 2003 (an earlier outbreak in Hong Kong
killed six people in 1997), has now spread to
Russia, Central Asia, parts of Europe and Africa.
Public-health officials fear that the
lethal flu, which so far has killed more than 100
people across the world, has the characteristics
of a virus that could mutate into one that could
be passed between humans, resulting in a possible
global pandemic.
Until this week's response
to bird flu, the Myanmar regime had a record of
contempt for international assistance and regional
collaboration to help it deal with a host of
public-health problems that threatened both the
lives of its people and regional stability.
In August, the Global Fund to fight AIDS,
Tuberculosis and Malaria, an independent
international body set up to finance grassroots
efforts to combat the three pandemics, quit
working in the country after severe travel
restrictions placed on it by Yangon. Other
international humanitarian agencies aiding
civilians in Myanmar were also subject to similar
travel bans, virtually making it impossible for
them to reach affected areas.
Myanmar is
estimated to have between 170,000 and 620,000
people living with the human immunodeficiency
virus (HIV), which can cause AIDS. The annual new
infection rate among its 50 million population was
1.3%, making it the second-highest in Southeast
Asia, according to the UN agency for AIDS.
Until late 2003, Myanmar, which is a main
source of all strains of HIV that have spread
across Asia, according to the New York-based
Council on Foreign Relations, refused to
acknowledge it had an AIDS crisis, keeping the
story off all the country's tightly controlled and
frequently censored media.
The spread of
tuberculosis within Myanmar and beyond its borders
is also worrying public-health officials in
neighboring countries, since 97,000 new cases of
TB are reported in Myanmar every year and the
disease is appearing in refugee populations
arriving in Thailand. A sizable number of these
cases have been diagnosed as multi-drug-resistant.
