| Any other place, no big thing... (Where do they get these people?) |
Health experts are hoping that reports of a bird flu outbreak in North Korea prove unfounded, saying the disease would prove a nightmare to combat inside the isolated Stalinist state. Information reaching the outside world from North Korea is notoriously hard to verify and South Korean officials said they were unable to confirm a report that the North is suffering its first outbreak of avian influenza. "It would be a nightmare if it's true because we need governments to work with us and that might not be so easy with North Korea," said an official of the World Health Organization (WHO) who declined to be named.
According to the report by South Korea's Yonhap news agency on Tuesday, an outbreak of suspected bird flu has killed thousands of chickens at one of Pyongyang's largest poultry farms. The source of the report was a South Korean who had encountered North Korean officials on a business trip to Beijing, according to the news agency. The WHO said it was treating the report as a "rumor" so far and regional representatives were seeking more details. "As soon as we heard the report, we put in a request with Pyongyang for more information. We have got nothing back yet," said Harsaran Pandey, WHO regional information officer based in New Delhi. She said the world body had an acting representative in the North Korean capital. "Even so, it is a difficult country to get information out of."
If confirmed, it would be the first time that bird flu, which has caused serious health risks in Southeast Asia and China, has hit the isolated communist state. North Korea has said the country was free of the disease and recently tightened quarantine checks at airports, seaports and border areas. Experts said, however, that the disease was no respecter of borders and could have been carried into North Korea through infected migratory birds heading north from Southeast Asia at the approach of spring. Since late 2003 the WHO has registered a total of 69 human cases of the H5N1 strain of bird flu, of which 46 were fatal. If Pyongyang comes up with confirmation, international health officials will offer to help it combat the outbreak that could be costly and damaging for a country unable to feed its people. North Korea has for more than a decade relied on food aid from donor countries to meet the needs of its 23 million people.
A confirmed outbreak of bird flu would necessarily trigger a vast cull of poultry, a main source of animal protein for North Koreans. According to one Yonhap report, starving North Koreans had dug up and consumed the infected chickens that had been buried at the Pyongyang farm. The WHO's Pandey said the international body was hoping for cooperation from North Korea. However, she recalled the recent case of its communist neighbor China, which hushed up the scale of a major outbreak of SARS two years ago. North Korea, which escaped the SARS epidemic, has shown a similar pattern of behavior in the past. Foreign aid workers were only reluctantly allowed into the country in the mid-1990s well after the scale of a devastating famine had already become apparent. Pandey said the WHO had no power "to go marching in" to North Korea. "We only go in at the invitation of a particular country," she said. "But if there was a problem we would very politely demand to come in."
No indication it has infected people, but still a concern. |