UN hails Asian transparency over bird flu GENEVA (AFP) - The UN's top official on bird flu on Wednesday praised heightened levels of transparency in Asian countries over cases of the disease, but warned that more was need to prepare for a possible pandemic.
"To have information promptly is the ultimate goal," said David Nabarro, the UN's senior system coordinator for avian and human influenza.
"We believe that just about every country is giving us that information promptly," regarding bird flu cases and human cases of the H5N1 virus, he told journalists.
He highlighted Indonesia, the country worst hit so far by bird flu, for its transparency in alerting global health authorities to any new cases.
"The government of Indonesia tells the world when it has problems," Nabarro said.
Indonesia's health ministry reported earlier on Wednesday that a five-year-old girl has died of bird flu, raising the nation's toll to 89.
Bird flu is usually transmitted directly from infected birds -- typically poultry -- to humans.
However, scientists fear that the virus could eventually mutate into a form easily transmissible between people, triggering a global pandemic that could potentially kill millions.
Nabarro said that H5N1 is "entrenched" in the poultry populations of at least six countries -- Indonesia, parts of northern Egypt, Nigeria, Bangladesh, China and Vietnam.
China, which was criticised for its reticence over the SARS outbreak in 2003, is also proving extremely forthcoming over cases of bird flu, and has worked hard to build up its infrastructure to ensure a reliable flow of information from across the country, Nabarro noted.
"There is no holdback of information as far as we can tell from the Chinese authorities," he said.
Even Myanmar's secretive military junta has cooperated with health officials on the issue, he added.
However Nabarro stressed that all countries in both the developed and developing world need to step up their efforts to cope with a possible H5N1 pandemic amongst humans.
He said it was vital to ensure infrastructure such as financial services and transport systems are able to function in the event of any outbreak.
Being prepared for a pandemic will also help countries cope with other, non disease-related catastrophes such as terrorism or natural disasters, he added.
The World Health Organisation said on Tuesday that recent scientific advances should boost production capacity of pandemic flu vaccines to 4.5 billion doses annually by 2010.
However this is still short of the WHO's target of being able to provide a vaccine to all of the world's 6.7 billion people within six months of a pandemic being declared.
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