Its a small small (dangerous) world

Sorry if this post reeks of teh scary, but there are things which should worry you, at least a little.

With an estimated 2.1 billion airline passengers roaming the planet last year alone, infectious diseases are spreading faster than ever before, the UN health agency said Thursday.

The World Health Organization called on governments to follow its revised regulations for fighting dangerous health crises.

"New diseases are emerging at the historically unprecedented rate of one per year," the WHO's director-general, Dr. Margaret Chan, said in an introduction to the annual World Health Report.

"It would be extremely naïve and complacent to assume that there will not be another disease like AIDS, another Ebola, or another SARS, sooner or later," the report said.

The thrust of WHO's efforts to protect global health has been the revision of the International Health Regulations, which came into effect in June. The voluntary regulations govern how countries should report potentially dangerous health emergencies to WHO.

Personal note: I went through the Taiwan airport during the height of the SARS epidemic. The little boy pictured above was not unusual. Almost everyone had masks on.

I, of course, was immortal and eschewed a mask. Because I'm posting now it is proof self-evident I am, in fact, immortal. Muahahaha.

Via International Herald Tribune (there are others).

Indonesia to resume sending H5N1 samples to WHO

Hahaha. Those sneaky Indonesians.

Just joking. This is a shrewd move on their part. Its about time countries insist they be treated equally. Jakarta had a trump card and played it.

Indonesia will resume sharing bird flu samples with the World Health Organisation (WHO), but under a new mechanism aimed at ensuring developing nations get access to vaccines, the health minister and the WHO said on Friday.

In a controversial move, Jakarta last week declared it would only share its H5N1 bird flu virus samples with parties who agreed not to use them for commercial reasons and had stopped sharing them with the WHO.

"We agree to responsible sharing practices and we're going to do it soon," Health Minister Siti Fadillah Supari told reporters.

She said that a proposal would be drawn up that would be fair and guarantee access for any products resulting from the sharing of samples to other developing countries.

(read more)

Indonesia declares bird flu a national disaster

Bird flu isn't going away whether you want it to or not. The WHO (World Health Organization) is predicting a world-wide pandemic.

Indonesia is set to declare bird flu as a national disaster, giving the government access to special funds to combat the disease that has killed 63 people nationwide, the planning minister said today.

“It has become an epidemic,” Paskah Suzetta said in the capital, Jakarta, where authorities are preparing for the compulsory slaughter of thousands of backyard chickens as part of high-profile efforts to fight the H5N1 virus.

“The president has indicated he will declare it a national disaster so money can be allocated from the state budget’s disaster fund,” he added.

Indonesia, which has suffered more than a third of the world’s human deaths from bird flu, has been criticised in the past for failing to crack down on the disease when it first appeared in poultry stocks nearly four years ago.

It is now endemic in chickens almost all over the country and, despite optimism late last year that it may have been contained, killed six people in the last month. Many of the 63 people who have died lived near Jakarta, home also to more than 100,000 backyard chickens, ducks, doves and song birds.

Authorities, who gave residents weeks to voluntarily get rid of their birds, will now go door to door in some neighbourhoods to make sure the order is carried out, said Jakarta Governor Sutiyoso.

(read more)