Bamako, December 08, 2006 - Experts on bird flu were increasingly concerned for Africa on Wednesday as an international conference heard that three countries on the world's poorest continent continued to record outbreaks of the deadly disease.

The first international forum on bird flu to be organised in Africa came amid fears that the continent, already reputed for its failing facilities for human and veterinary health care, risked becoming a permanent host to the virus.

An African Union (AU) official, Modibo Traore, said: "Eight African countries have been infected since the start of the crisis, three continue to record new" cases.

The three were Nigeria, Africa's most populous country of 130 million people and the first to be affected by the virus in February, Sudan and Egypt.

'No African country is safe'

Traore, the director of the AU's inter-African centre for animal resources, said: "At the rate (the virus) is spreading, no African country is safe from contamination."

The scare for Africa - already grappling with HIV/Aids and malaria - had prompted the United Nations and World Bank experts to forecast that global donors would have to grant more funding for the fight against avian flu.

In the run up to the Mali conference, the experts forecast that about an extra billion dollars would be required in the coming few years to fight the spread of the deadly virus to ill-prepared countries in Africa and the Middle East.

Other African countries so far affected were Niger, Cameroon, Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast and Djibouti.

Traore said that in the eight African countries concerned, the H5N1 strain had resulted in the death and destruction of 15 million birds, adding that there had been very few cases of human contamination.

Egypt, Nigeria 'worst hit countries'

Joseph Domenech, head of the animal health service of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), said: "The virus is continuing to circulate, but has not taken on the explosive character it had in Asia."

He said the worst hit African countries were Egypt and Nigeria. Domenech said that Africa needed to "be subject to very specific attention" due to its significant social and economic difficulties.

He said: "The investments are not there, there is not enough support for Africa."

Egypt, with a population of 74 million people, had to date been the only country to record human cases with seven deaths out of the 15 cases detected.

Traore said the weak and non-functioning epidemiological surveillance systems in Africa "constitute a serious threat not only to the affected countries, but also the rest of the continent and planet".

Since the last conference in China in January, the H5N1 strain of the bird flu virus, which could be transmitted to humans and was potentially fatal, had spread to more countries after its re-appearance in Asia in late 2003.

Courtesy: News24

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