Bird flu has once again raised its ugly head in Nepal. Not that the threat ever went away completely. It would be foolhardy for any government to rest on its laurels on bird flu, but Nepali health authorities have been caught unawares, once again, as more bird flu incidences are being reported from around the country, the latest of them in Lalitpur. Only four days after the slaughter of 6,000 chicken from a farm in Lalitpur´s Bhaisepati, the virus has been reported in another poultry farm nearby. A month ago it was Bhaktapur farms that were hit by the scourge. According to veterinarians, while the flu virus is fairly innocuous in wild fowl, it spreads rapidly in poultry as it gains in virility. The most alarming prospect is of the virus morphing into a human-infectious form, which is, thankfully, a rare occurrence.
We have been raising this important issue time and again. Although bird-to-human transmission of bird flu virus is rare, if it does come to pass, it could have catastrophic consequences. Once the flu virus makes the jump to humans, its development is hard to track. Such a situation will be akin to sitting on a ticking time bomb. Given such dire consequences, it is baffling why the government has not given the issue deserved attention. What successive governments have done, rather inanely in our view, is time and again declare the country ´bird flu free´ zone, apparently to sooth frayed nerves among the people. In truth, any such declaration is meaningless given the ease with which poultry can be imported through the porous Indo-Nepal border points that are still without any effective monitory mechanism against bird flu.
The government´s lack of preparedness was ignominiously highlighted during the last spread of bird flu among the poultry in Eastern Nepal around a month ago. Bizarrely, culling of infected fowl had to be put off as Tamiflu, the vital anti-viral for those involved in slaughter, was in short supply. This had a devastating effect because the longer the authorities dithered in arranging for the all-important anti-viral, the more the virus spread. Why the government didn’t bother to keep such a vital medicine in stock is anyone’s guess. Yet another major hurdle at curbing the spread of the virus is that Nepal has no labs to confirm reported bird flu cases. Instead, it has been sending samples from dead fowl all the way to London.
Why this has to be the case is not exactly clear. For in the wake of the bird flu epidemic in Europe five years ago, medical firms have been putting out bird flu test kits for as little as US $6 dollars. Surely, this is a pittance considering what is on the line here. Isn´t the government missing a trick? Or are we missing something?
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