Bird flu as a national security threat

OneWorld UK

By Daniel Nelson

Air traffic will be halted if there is a major outbreak of bird flu, Laurie Garrett of the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations warned in London - and that would have an immediate impact on Western countries such as Britain.

Britains economic life is now based on "Just In Time" deliveries, because businesses consider it financially wasteful to hold stocks. So goods would start running out as soon as the planes stopped flying.

This would affect even food, because so much is imported, she told an audience at the London School of Economics.

There would be many other implications. Western countries in which avian flu vaccine factories were situated would probably concentrate on vaccinating their own populations, angering the rest of the world. (The World Health Organisations best-case scenario envisages enough vaccine for only five per cent of the worlds population.)

As a result, millions of poor people might try to enter rich countries to get a flu jab.

And if the nine richest Western governments that account for more than 70 per cent of the worlds GDP failed to share their resources and simply watched like death voyeurs, there would be a huge foreign policy fall-out.

Such possibilities, she said, meant that pandemics like avian flu and HIV/AIDS were not just health problems, but matters of national security.

Garrett emphasised that H5N1 (avian flu) was not just another influenza strain: it had never been seen in humans and no-one had natural immunity. The mortality rate so far was 55 per cent, and survivors were often seriously debilitated. It had the potential to kill on a scale equalled only by nuclear warfare.

She warned that a combination of factors was increasing the likelihood of its emergence as an epidemic: because of severe environmental degradation in China, birds on the main Indonesia-China migration route were increasingly forced to land on farms, where they passed the virus to other animals. The range of infected birds was now vast and it is just a matter of time before birds all over Europe are contaminated.

At the same time, chicken breeding and consumption was rocketing, raising the risk that the virus would infect humans.

Garrett - author of a recent US Council of Foreign Relations report "HIV and National Security: Where Are the Links?" - said Western countries should have been alerted to the national security implications of epidemics by HIV and AIDS but had failed to learn the lesson because it was a slow motion epidemic. Even as an individual infection, it could take years to become apparent. The epidemic was in its infancy, with the full impact still to be felt.

Most governments in the rich world responded to cases in their own countries, and then sat back for a long time watching Africa and other place die. Aid was now at last in the billions but one could argue that we are barely lifting a finger.

With a flu pandemic, governments would be able to take only a few actions: people would have to respond as local communities, returning to an approach to a life that had been forgotten knowing they neighbour, loving thy neighbour.

Answering questions, she agreed there was a danger that concentrating on flu and HIV and AIDS could draw attention away from other diseases. In 10 years there could be an increase in mortality, especially among children, because of the diversion of resources. Tackling epidemics, she emphasised, was not just a question of money, but of healthcare resources which was why the migration of nurses from India, Pakistan and southern Africa to Britain and the US was so damaging.

We could [in future] look back and say the emphasis on HIV and AIDS had destroyed all our work on child healthcare.

Laurie Garrett

WHO