An expert consensus-conference, coordinated by the International Federation, ended yesterday in Cartigny, Switzerland, after agreeing ways of assessing resilience to an influenza pandemic in a group of target countries worldwide.
The conference was organized by the International Federation’s new avian and human influenza (AHI) department, whose creation was announced earlier this month by the International Federation Secretary General Markku Niskala, saying he’d tasked it with “promoting an imperative elemental to the Red Cross Red Crescent Global Agenda”.
The conference was facilitated by a team of Brussels-based specialists who are leaders in the field of community resilience.
It involved scientists, International Federation secretariat staff and programme partners: the Core Group, InterAction and the Academy for Educational Development, as well as the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and representatives from the American, Egyptian, Ethiopian, Indonesian and Nepalese National Societies.
The two-day meeting developed standard language to rate “levels of competence” in facing the threat of pandemic influenza in especially at-risk countries. It will now be field-tested by National Societies.
“This should enable us to make better use of scarce resources in the effort to limit any future pandemic,” according to Pierre Duplessis, the International Federation’s special envoy on avian and human influenza and AHI department’s head.
“Practical measures”
The World Health Organization (WHO) has described a global influenza pandemic as an “ongoing threat” that demands “continued vigilance”.
The Cartigny conference coincided with this week’s meeting in Geneva of WHO’s supreme decision-making body, the World Health Assembly, at which pandemic preparedness is high on the agenda.
“Every time another person catches the H5N1 flu virus from a bird the chances increase of it evolving into one that spreads easily from human to human – the precursor of pandemic,” argues Duplessis, a former secretary general of the Canadian Red Cross.
“We must be careful not to spread alarm – still less panic,” he adds, “but there are simple, practical measures that all communities can take that would save many, many lives in an actual pandemic.
“We need to know how ready we really are to meet this danger and develop our work accordingly.”
The International Federation’s current humanitarian pandemic preparedness initiative, which arose from its 2006 global appeal for avian and human influenza, is a three-year programme funded by USAID.
Begun last September, it will boost community-level “first response” in developing nations thought to be most vulnerable to the pandemic threat.
Egypt and Ethiopia are at the pre-implementation stage, to be joined shortly by Nepal, with discussions underway in Mali, Rwanda and Uganda.
“The Egyptian Red Crescent is very keen to be among the first National Societies to implement a project on pandemic preparedness,” said Professor Mamdouh Gabr, its secretary general, who was at the conference.
“Egypt is one of the few countries where avian influenza became endemic, and although it’s substantially under control now there are still cases emerging, with occasional transmission to humans.
“But we have one of the lowest human mortality rates.”
First line of defence
Duplessis adds: “H5N1 first crossed species from birds to humans in the backyards and livestock markets of Asia – crowded, bustling places where people live close to their birds.
“They’re also exactly where a community-based organization like the Red Cross Red Crescent can make the greatest contribution in the urgent preventive effort – the world’s first line of defence.”
No country in the world has suffered from H5N1 (still the most likely source of a pandemic virus in people) more than Indonesia, where bird flu in humans is not far short of a death sentence.
Of 133 cases there to date, 108 have been fatal – 44 per cent of all deaths worldwide during the current outbreak.
In April the health ministry in Jakarta announced the most recent of those deaths: a three-year-old boy in Central Java who may have been exposed to sick and dead poultry.
The Cartigny conference was also attended by Professor Amal Chalik Sjaaf, head of health and social services for the Indonesian Red Cross.
The word influenza features prominently in the opening chapter of the International Federation. Its predecessor, the League, was formed in May 1919, within a few months of the peak death-rate of the 1918–9 pandemic that many historians say took 20–40 million lives, making it one of the most deadly events in human history.
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| Children take their own temperatures during a flu-pandemic exercise at a school in Singapore. Photo courtesy of Reuters/Nicky Loh (RTR1FOTJ) |
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Expert consensus: Professor Amal Chalik Sjaaf of the Indonesian Red Cross (left) and Pierre Duplessis at Cartigny. Photo: Alex Wynter/International federation (p17662)
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Nicolle LaFleur, American Red Cross (right), and Chinese Red Cross colleagues distribute bird-flu prevention posters to villagers in the Chinese province of Sichuan. Photo: American Red Cross (p17663)
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