Possible Threat of Bird Flu :How not to handle that bird
BY VICTORIA OJEME
Influenza A (H1N1) is a highly contagious respiratory illness with such symptoms as fever, sneezing, coughing, headache, running nose, sore throat and sometimes diarrhoea and vomiting.
A select group of animals pose the greatest threats of passing on a disease to humans, including one that could become contagious. These creatures — whether wild, domestic or livestock — tend to be those close to humans, both in terms of physical proximity and genetics.
“The closer a specie is related to us, the greater the chance that a pathogen it carries can infect us,” says the EcoHealth Alliance’s Das Zak.
“You’re not going to die from a lizard virus, but you could from a mammalian virus.”
Common culprits include ubiquitous rodents, backyard birds and primates, the latter blamed for the introduction of HIV. Bats pose yet another threat.
“Bats are the stuff Hollywood movies are made of,” says Jennifer McQuiston, an epidemiologist at the CDC in Atlanta. “The fact that they can fly and migrate across great distances might mean they are exposed to more things that they can then bring back to native populations.”
By destroying bat habitats, humans effectively encourage the winged mammals to search for surrogate sources of food – such as fruit orchards – that are located closer to where large clusters of people live. Bats are an effective carrier for Nipah because they don’t suffer ill effects from the disease.
On a macro level, climate change can influence the movement of animals from one habitat to another, creating novel interactions with other species, including humans. Even slight changes in temperature can affect reproductive cycles of disease vectors such as mosquitoes and ticks. Heat waves, droughts, floods and other extreme weather events have been linked to increased infectious disease outbreaks and, as a new report published this month reinforced, to global warming.
Many diseases emerge or reemerge as a result of multiple factors. The resurgence of malaria, for instance, is driven in part by climate change, human development and the overuse of pesticides. A similar collection of unfortunate inputs could explain the dynamics of the bird flu, a disease that appears to be threatening to reemerge after a couple of quiet years. The migratory pathways and movement patterns of wild waterfowl, which can be influenced by long-term climate change, are what “keeps the flu chugging along,” said Ostfeld. Temporary limitations on standing water, such as drought, and permanent limits, like human development, forces more birds to fewer water sources, increasing the chance of contact and viral transmission.
Meanwhile, international collaborations are enhancing worldwide surveillance of human and animal diseases, and sharing strategies. Last February, the first International One Health Congress met in Melbourne, Australia. Bruce Kaplan, a retired veterinarian in Florida and member of the conference’s scientific advisory committee, hopes to further the cause through the One Health Initiative, a collaborative effort he started with Kahn a few years ago. He runs the group’s website, which he noted hosts visitors from over 100 different countries every day. Among those nations is Nigeria.
Like its neighboring countries, Nigeria’s infectious disease concerns range from the bird flu and rabies to Lassa fever, HIV, brucellosis and tuberculosis.
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A One Health Nigeria Google group led by Tayo Babalobi, a Nigerian veterinary epidemiologist, aims to serve as a platform for communication between medical, veterinary, laboratory and environmental scientists. Babalobi says Nigeria also has the world’s first epidemiology program with a veterinary tract, which he says other African countries have expressed interest in emulating. Further, Nigeria is currently working to create a version of a One Health_centered CDC
Prof Garuba Hamidu Sharubutu of the Department of Vet Medicine, Usman Dan Fodio University who doubles as president of animal welfare initiative, called on Nigerians to be more cautious as it approaches the dry season.
Prof Sharubutu who spoke to Sunday Vanguard in a telephone interview said that “actually we are approaching the season but I must be sincere to you that we hope not to experience bird flu this year; preparations are all on ground in all the teaching hospitals and the diagnostic laboratory have been upgraded”.
He advise private owners to fast track their efforts in taking over markets for better sanity, “in other not to fall back again, markets should be handed over to private owners to monitor if not we are running a risk of going back to square one, because the past problem of bird flu saw the international community assisting us.
The truth is that we cannot continue to fold our hands and be waiting for them all the time”.
