GENEVA - United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan called on world leaders on Thursday to pool resources including antivirals and vaccines to ensure that all countries are equipped against a feared human influenza pandemic.
Annan, speaking after visiting the World Health Organisation (WHO), said patent issues should not stand in the way of making such life-saving medicines available to poor countries, as had happened with AIDS.
"I would appeal to world leaders around the world to come together, to pool their efforts and make their resources available and to assist those countries which do not have the capacity to set up their own systems," Annan told reporters.
"We should be clear that in this situation we will take measures to make sure that poor and rich have access to medicines and vaccines required," he added.
The H5N1 bird flu virus has killed at least 60 people in four Asian nations since late 2003, and has killed or forced the destruction of tens of millions of poultry.
Experts say the H5N1 strain is mutating steadily and fear it will eventually acquire the changes it needs to spread easily amongst humans. If it does, they say, it will sweep around the world in months and could kill millions of people.
"We need to make sure that we do not allow intellectual property to get in the way of access of the poor to medicines by allowing for emergency production of vaccines in developing countries," Annan said.
"I would not want to hear the kind of debate we got into on anti-retrovirals," he added, referring to patent rights on life-prolonging drugs against the AIDS epidemic.
Annan last week appointed former WHO official David Nabarro as senior UN system coordinator for avian and human influenza to gear up global efforts to control any epidemic.
RISK IS GREAT
Only 40 of WHO's 192 member countries have drawn up pandemic preparedness plans, according to Margaret Chan, the WHO's top official for the pandemic. Only 30 wealthy countries have stockpiled or ordered antivirals.
"We feel that the opportunity for the virus to make adaptive changes is real. The pandemic risk is great, the timing is unpredictable and the severity is uncertain," Chan said.
"Early warning systems which are critical to get information and intelligence are very weak in most countries," she added.
Chan, as head of Hong Kong's health department in 1997, when bird flu first made the jump to humans, within days ordered the entire poultry population of 1.5 million birds slaughtered.
The bird flu outbreak has led to culling of 140 million birds and caused economic losses of 10 billion euros ($12 billion) worldwide, she said.
"We are in this together. With travel these days, we saw how SARS very quickly got to North America in no time at all," Annan said, referring to the spread of the deadly new disease Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) from Asia to Canada in 2003.
Story by Stephanie Nebehay
REUTERS NEWS SERVICE
