SMUGGLING OF VACCINES

Thailand’s English-language daily ‘Bangkok Post’ reported on Jan. 7 that marine police arrested three Bangkok residents who tried to smuggle Chinese bird-flu vaccines. The police said it was not the first time the group had attempted this, adding that it had tracked the gang a month back. The report also underscored how poultry raisers in Thailand are vaccinating their birds with smuggled vaccines, despite the government’s prohibitions. This is hardly news, especially in the northern provinces, as I found out since I was on assignment in Chiang Mai to cover bird flu stories when the ‘Post’ published the vaccine smuggling story. I asked for a commentary from a senior public health official, but he preferred to be anonymous.

Vaccination itself is a subject of much debate. Some poultry raisers and experts believe that vaccination can prevent their birds from catching bird flu and dying from it. Yet, some virologists argue that vaccination would speed up virus mutations to a point that it triggers a pandemic. In real life, such a situation has happened -- vaccinated poultry do show symptoms of the disease while carrying and disseminating the virus. According to the Chiang Mai public health official, bird flu vaccines are far from mature, and it is thus very difficult for health departments to trace the origin and routes of infection if vaccinated birds spread the virus. He believes that vaccination makes control and prevention efforts against the H5N1 virus more complicated. Vietnam uses a lot of vaccines, but had new outbreaks in its Mekong Delta region recently he points out.

A check of Xinhua News Agency’s recent reports on bird flu in Vietnam showed claims by the Vietnamese government that outbreaks took place in poultry farms that did not vaccinate their birds. Xinhua also reports that Vietnam will import some 500 million doses of bird flu vaccines to vaccinate fowl in the 2007-2008 period.

For a better understanding of vaccination as a prevention strategy, I went to Cao Ping, senior veterinarian at Beijing Livestock Husbandry and Veterinary Station. Cao said that vaccination could control and even eliminate bird flu -- if used properly and correctly in the long run. It only takes some 50 days of feeding before chickens reach market size, and hens have to be eliminated after 500 days because of decreasing egg production.

So, even if vaccinated birds carry the virus and spread it, what is the amount of virus that they carry? What is the exact amount of the virus that vaccinated birds discharge? How long could the virus survive in the vaccinated birds? And, will the virus still be harmful after vaccination? All of these questions are very technical, and there are no single and simple answers. There is not much practical significance debating these questions, which will only result in more public fears or panic according to Cao.

International public health experts agree that thorough cooking kills the bird flu virus. According to WHO’s Chinese website, there is no evidence that humans can contract the virus with well-cooked poultry and poultry products, even if these have the H5N1 virus.

Further discussion of the vaccine issue leads to different control and prevention strategies between developing and developed countries. For developed countries, culling is their only choice; they do not use vaccines. But many developing countries, cannot afford the economic cost of culling. For them, a combination of, if not a compromise between, culling and vaccination is a more pragmatic option.

According to Cao, culling is the only option when bird flu hits poultry farms in the United States and the European Union. Some modern farms go as far as abandoning disease-hit houses and building news ones at different locations. Such strict measures can ensure that contagious animal diseases will not come back for a certain period of time.

Effective culling also depends heavily on compensation policies, which test governments’ financial resources. Cao referred to the British government’s compensation policy when the hoof-and- mouth disease hit the country in 2001. Affected farmers received compensation at rates higher than the market price of their infected livestock, and this led to the rapid and effective containment of the disease in its early stage. However, in the developing world, especially in South-east Asia where backyard poultry is so common and where governments usually face constraints in giving out generous compensation, it is difficult to fully implement culling.