A bird flu pandemic could paralyze Canada's manufacturing sector for more than a year and cost the country hundreds of millions of dollars in medical costs, the Conference Board of Canada says.
Sketching a worst-case scenario, the board warns up to 1.6 million Canadians - and between 180 and 360 million people worldwide - could die if a global pandemic is triggered by the H5N1 avian influenza virus.
Hitching a ride on migrating birds, the virus has already travelled from Asia to Europe and yesterday, in preliminary testing, was identified in Greece.
The Conference Board's forecast far exceeds other casualty estimates, including those by Frank Plummer, lab director of the National Microbiology Lab in Winnipeg, who said yesterday a human strain of the avian flu will kill up to 50,000 Canadians.
Despite the uncertainty over the numbers, experts agree the threat is enormous.
"There seems to be a consensus - there is a catastrophe coming," Conference Board president Anne Golden told a Star editorial board meeting yesterday.
Last July, Ontario's chief medical officer, Dr. Sheela Basrur, told delegates to the 15th World Conference on Disaster Management that an influenze pandemic could affect between 15 and 35 per cent of Ontario's population, resulting in 2,900 to 19,700 deaths.
Efforts to wall Canada off from the global pandemic will be futile, the Conference Board warns in its report, Performance and Potential 2005-06: The World and Canada: Trends Reshaping Our Future.
"This long-awaited flu virus is expected to be so contagious that any attempt to close off borders and control migration would be ineffective," the non-profit business body said in its 10th annual performance report, which identifies steps Canada should be taking to increase economic productivity.
The Conference Board report came as leaders in the worldwide fight against avian flu warned yesterday of the need for global co-operation in stopping the virus from spreading, and eradicating it.
Dr. Michael Ryan, director of WHO's department of epidemic and pandemic alert and response, warned the world's oceans will provide no safety.
"There's no question that we will expect further outbreaks of avian disease in different countries," Ryan said. "The Americas, Africa and the Middle East are also very much in our minds."
U.S. Health Secretary Mike Leavitt, too, sounded a warning.
"It would be my assessment that no nation is adequately prepared for a pandemic avian flu," Leavitt said. But, he added, "I believe that most nations are improving, and preparation is increasing."
WHO's influenza program director, Klaus Stoehr, said the big question is when.
"We don't know whether a pandemic will break out in the coming weeks, months or only in years," Stoehr said. "But there's no question that, if such a pandemic occurs, we'll be looking at hundreds of thousands or even millions of deaths worldwide."
The virus, which has already become widespread in Asia, was recently identified in Romania and Turkey, and yesterday in Greece preliminary tests detected bird flu in a turkey on a farm on the Aegean Sea.
The steady westward creep prompted the World Health Organization to say yesterday that, while the virus can be expected to spread to other countries, the biggest threat of it mutating into a human virus that could kill millions remains in Asia.
Experts believe a human flu pandemic derived from a bird virus is inevitable, but it's unknown whether the deadly H5N1 strain, which has already killed 60 people in Asia since 2003, will be responsible.
"The introductions in Europe do represent a worrying development," Ryan said. "The pandemic risk is increased by the very extension of the bird disease" to the new countries.
"This just adds more complexity to what is already a serious issue."
WHO suspects Asia will be the cradle of any emerging human pandemic because containment efforts there are stymied by a culture where people and animals live in close proximity.
In Asia, 117 people - most of them poultry farmers - have caught the disease in the past two years, and 60 have died. Nearly all the infections have been traced to direct contact with infected birds, instead of human-to-human transmission.
Vietnam, Korea, China, Japan and Myanmar have all reported cases, and more than 150 million birds have either died from the disease or slaughtered in a bid to stop it from spreading.
It hasn't been enough.
"The disease is highly endemic in many bird populations at the moment, and humans will continue to be at risk for a significant period of time," Ryan noted. That risk yesterday prompted United Nations flu czar Dr. David Nabarro to call on wealthy countries to help poor Asian countries fight the threat.
The world, he said, should "invest quite generously" in efforts to stamp out the virus in Asia before it can spread widely and spark a human pandemic.
WHO's chief, Dr. Lee Jong-Wook, concurred, and expressed his belief that any pandemic is likely to start somewhere in southeast Asia, since countries there have experienced continuing outbreaks of bird flu, and have had the least success in eliminating the threat.
"Considering the current situation, it seems to be a matter of time before a flu pandemic takes place."
With files from Star wire services
LUXEMBOURG - The European Union declared today the spread of bird flu from Asia into the EU a "global threat" requiring international co-operation, saying western Europe was ill prepared to deal with an influenza emergency.
Western European governments scrambled to buy industrial quantities of flu vaccines and face masks to protect citizens from possible infection.
EU Health Commissioner Markos Kyprianou said most of the 25 EU governments lack sufficient stocks of anti-viral drugs designed to boost resistance to the common flu of such risk groups as the elderly, the young, diabetics and others.
He said the EU was working on a deal with the pharmaceutical industry whereby EU governments will "increase vaccination for seasonal flu ... and the industry will invest more to build up manufacturing capacity."
"We have not reached the level of (vaccination) preparedness that we should have," Kyprianou told reporters after updating the EU foreign ministers on the westward spreading of bird flu.
The EU was investigating a possible outbreak in Greece of the lethal H5N1 bird flu virus, which has killed 60 people in Asia. The H5N1 strain has been confirmed in Turkey and Romania.
Macedonian authorities said they will quarantine a small southern village, cull 10,000 chickens and send a sample from a dead chicken to Britain for bird flu testing following an outbreak of a highly contagious but common bird disease.
Swiss pharmaceutical company Roche Holding AG, meanwhile, is completing a new production pipeline in the United States to boost production of its Tamiflu anti-viral drug amid fears about bird flu, and is ready to seek help from other companies to meet surging demand, the company said today.
British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said the EU has a duty to reassure public opinion.
"Members of the public are bound to be concerned," he said after chairing an emergency EU foreign ministers meeting, adding that every effort must be made to show that there is a co-ordinated response to an outbreak.
The World Health Organization has said although the arrival of the virus in a new location is worrying - because more virus means more opportunities for genetic mutations - it does not mean a human flu pandemic is closer.
Isolated outbreaks that are swiftly controlled pose a minor threat compared with prolonged outbreaks where birds continue to mix with people, as in Asia.
The EU health ministers, meeting Thursday and Friday outside London, will discuss national flu preparedness programs, including the availability of anti-viral drugs across western Europe.
After meeting with the EU foreign ministers, Kyprianou said the EU will shortly stage a "command post exercise" to test national preparedness plans.
"This is a global threat," Kyprianou said. "We cannot protect ourselves alone. There is a need for international action and international solidarity with countries in Asia."
The H5N1 bird flu strain has swept poultry populations in large swathes of Asia since 2003, resulting in the deaths of tens of millions of birds.
There is no human vaccine for the current strain of bird flu, but scientists believe the Tamiflu drug may help humans fight bird flu contraction.
Bird flu’s westward move is caused by migrating wild fowl.
It has intensified fears in Europe the virus may mutate into one that can be easily transmitted among humans - a development that experts fear could provoke a global epidemic that puts millions of lives at risk.
The EU stepped up biosecurity measures and installed early-detection systems along the migratory paths of birds to prevent contamination of domestic flocks.
The EU foreign ministers stressed the need for the EU to co-ordinate any efforts to stamp out bird flu in consultation with specialized UN organizations.
European officials say EU member countries, as well as Iceland, Norway and Liechtenstein, have only 10 million doses now for an area of almost 500 million people, and will have only 46 million doses by the end of 2007.
Stockpiling vaccines is difficult as flu viruses can mutate quickly.
Fifty million masks to protect against bird flu are being delivered to French hospitals with 200 million to be available by the beginning of 2006, Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin said. Villepin told legislators that by year’s end France would have enough anti-viral medication to treat 14 million people.
The Spanish government will order six million to 11 million doses of anti-viral medicines to prepare for the possibility of a flu epidemic, the Spanish Health Ministry said, giving it enough medication to treat between 15 and 25 per cent of the population of 40 million.
The Cypriot government announced today it will order another 20,000 vaccines as a precaution against bird flu and urged the public to remain calm.
'Is Tamiflu A Prescription For Survival?'
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