India needs more funds to fight bird flu

India needs more funding to deal with the massive threat of bird flu, prime minister Dr Manmohan Singh told a conference of international bird flu experts in the Indian capital on Wednesday. The prime minister said the international community must renew its commitments to deal with the disease, which has killed more than 200 worldwide people since 2003 and could potentially lead to a deadly human pandemic (a widespread epidemic across continents). He said that though many pledges have been fulfilled, India needs more funding support to fight bird flu. John Lange, the United States' special representative for avian and pandemic influenza, said the US would announce later in the conference a large increase in US funding. He said that the United States had already pledged $434 million in international assistance a year ago. India, home to millions of farmers who keep poultry in their backyards, has seen three major outbreaks of bird flu in poultry since 2006, all of which were brought under control, but without recording any human cases. The prime minister stressed that countries must focus on animal health as well as human health to deal with the disease, and that measures to prevent outbreaks in backyard poultry remained limited for now. He said that the best available strategy is to control it at the level of the animal, and investments in public health will be unproductive without ensuring the health of our livestock. He also said that an Indian laboratory had developed a poultry vaccine using the Indian strain, and other research efforts are continuing. For now, humans usually contract the virus only after close contact with infected birds, with the virus killing nearly two-thirds of the people it infects. But experts worry it may mutate into a form easily transmitted from person to person, leading to a pandemic. Around a fifth of humanity could fall ill should there be another flu pandemic, according to estimates cited by the World Health Organisation, with catastrophic effects on the global economy. According to WHO, there have been roughly three flu pandemics each century since the 16th century.