When representatives from over 100 countries met at a donors' conference in China last month to hear about the dangers of avian influenza and a human flu pandemic, a key worry was impressed upon them. While global attention has mainly been concentrated on outbreaks in Asia and, more recently, nearer Europe, do not forget Africa.
David Harcharik, the deputy director-general of the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation portentously warned of the potential for "truly catastrophic" consequences if bird flu spread to the world's poorest continent.
This week it became clear that even as he made that address on January 18, Nigerian scientists were analysing samples from 40,000 poultry which had died two days earlier on a farm in in Jaji, a village in the northern state of Kaduna.
The Nigerian government has since confirmed that the H5N1 outbreak has spread to two more states. Hospitals in affected areas have been put on red alert, the governor of Kaduna said, and quarantined farms.
The director general of the World Health Organisation, Lee Jong-wook, said the arrival of bird flu in Africa was of "great concern". The immediate priority, he said, was to help the government launch a blanket public awareness campaign about the dangers of the virus and how to recognise the disease. He suggested that could be piggy-backed onto a pre-planned nationwide house-to-house polio immunisation campaign due to start in the country tomorrow.
Scientists who have been monitoring the spread of the latest outbreak of bird flu since it emerged in south-east Asia in 2003 have major worries about bird flu in Africa. Dr Jong-wook said African health systems are already struggling to cope with children and adults suffering from HIV/Aids, tuberculosis, malaria, respiratory infections and other infectious conditions.
"Human cases of H5N1 may be difficult to distinguish from other illnesses," he said. "We simply do not know what the impact of exposure to avian influenza will be on the many people who may be already immunocompromised and in a fragile state of health."
Epidemiologists fear that in Africa's vast rural areas, poorly educated populations may not recognise and report suspected cases of bird flu allowing the virus time to take hold and spread. There are also questions about how to convince some of the world's poorest and often malnourished people to slaughter livestock but not eat it. Many Asian bird flu deaths happened after owners ate sick birds. Nigerian farmers have already complained that authorities are not offering sufficient compensation for handing in livestock.
