According to a news report, health authorities have detected an outbreak of the H5N1 strain of bird flu at a poultry farm on the outskirts of Karachi, but they said there was no likelihood of any human infection.
However, coming so soon in the wake of the World Health Organisation's confirmation, last December, of Pakistan's first human death from bird flu infection amid worldwide scramble for prevention of an avian flu pandemic, it was likely to cause widespread fear among Karachiites, to say the least. It is, however, just another matter that the alarming revelation didn't create a scare like the one recently caused by the spread of dengue fever.
The reason for this should not be too far to seek either. Evidently, accustomed to living in the midst of threats of ghastly consequences of unbridled terrorist onslaughts, generally speaking, people appear to have acquired a resilience to all sorts of hazards and calamities. This is not to say either that they have been overtaken by fatalism or have developed apathy, a trait that has largely belonged to the variously changing governments for most part of Pakistan's history.
The calm discernible in people's behaviour pattern under such perilous circumstances, need not be misconstrued as a lack of awareness or concern. To the contrary, it unmistakeably signifies pragmatic self-control. For as it is, they have little time to spare from chasing scarce basic human needs of life with ever increasing deficiency of money to buy them.
Viewed in this perspective, the evident calm over the bird flu problem will appear to be based on hopes of its better handling by the WHO as backed by scientists and researchers associated with the contemporary world's pharmaceutical giants who are already gripped by a sense of urgency, the former out of concern for human suffering and the latter for its opportunity to make more profits. However, it is a consoling circumstance that benefiting from the progress made elsewhere towards pre-empting the grave consequences of avian flu pandemic, the concerned quarters in Pakistan can be seen as moving, somewhat tardily though, in the desired direction.
This has reference to the disclosure made by the General Secretary of Karachi Wholesale Poultry Association, Kamal Akhtar Siddiqui, that some 5,500 chickens at the affected farm had died of the virus, while the surviving 500 birds among them had been culled, adding there was no panic however. More to this, his observation that the farm at which the virus was detected had failed to adopt precautionary measures would point to increasing awareness of the threat, which will appear to be encouraging in its own way.
The same can be said about the official response to the outbreak of the bird flu. A Sindh government official is reported to have stated that laboratory tests had confirmed the presence of the virus in a Karachi poultry farms and that not only workers on the affected farm, but also on its adjacent farms were being monitored. Such revelations provide at least some indication the precautionary measures planned at various levels. Some idea of this may be had from the widening focus on its prevention.
It was in last December that Italian researchers reported that their study was among the first to call for an annual flu shot to help farmers' bodies fight off the H5N1 virus, which had killed 210 people in 13 countries and infected 341. They also found from their experiments that in some of the volunteers' immune systems, antibodies acted against the bird flu virus, while seasonal vaccine administration enhanced the frequency of such reactive cells, thus interpreting that flu vaccines need to be reformulated every year to match the mutations.
Little wonder, health experts the world over are trying to boost rates of annual flu vaccination because flu itself kills between 250,000 and 500,000 people a year, and that it would help the world prepare for fighting off a pandemic. Reference, in this regard, may also be made to the WHO's observation, late last year, that scientific advances should boost production capacity of pandemic flu vaccines to 4.5 billion doses annually by 2010.
According to it, with influenza vaccine production capacity on the rise, brightening were the prospects of effectively meeting the threat of an influenza pandemic. As then noted, pharmaceutical manufacturers, including global giants Novartis, GlaxoSmithKline and Sanofi-Pasteur, had been able to boost production of trivalent seasonal flu vaccines to around 565 million doses from 350 million in 2006. Notably, the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers and Associations were expected to be able to increase capacity to one billion doses in 2010.
This was still found short of the WHO's target of providing a vaccine to all of the world's 6.7 billion people within six months of declaration of a pandemic. It will be noted that efforts towards meeting the threat of bird flu pandemic are based on scientists' fear that the H5N1 strain of bird flu, which emerged in humans in Asia in the 1990s, could mutate into a more virulent form that could easily pass between humans, triggering a global flu pandemic with the potential to kill millions. Now that over 300 people have contracted H5N1 bird flu, since 2003, and out of them over 200 have died, Pakistan should have contributed to that effort too.