Member states of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) have been told to keep close watch on bird flu, particularly when scientists still do not know how the disease is spread in Africa.

Representatives of the African Union (AU), the SADC secretariat, the World Health Organization and technical committees from SADC member countries attended a workshop on bird flu Thursday in Pretoria.

They discussed SADC preparations to face the possible outbreak of the H5N1 avian flu, better known as bird flu.

The committees from the region presented risk assessments, state of preparedness reports, and recommendations from their countries.

The focus on tighter restrictions on poultry, as opposed to wild birds, was in part due to Africa's largely rural chicken farming industry and that cases of bird flu detected in Nigeria, Niger and Egypt were believed to be from poultry, said Modibo Traore, director of the AU Inter African bureau for animal resources.

"What happened in West Africa was probably linked to domestic birds, although there is no definitive proof," Traore was quoted as saying by the SAPA news agency.

He said there was, however, much to learn about the patterns of migratory birds within Africa.

"We know their routes from Europe to Asia, from Europe and Asia to Africa, but we do not know their intra-African migratory routes, " he said.

The H5N1 bird flu virus has led to the deaths of millions of birds in more than 30 countries. It has spread to over a dozen new countries in the past month and infected 175 people since 2003, killing 96 of them.

Although it remains an avian disease, and rarely affects humans, health officials fear it will mutate into a form that can easily jump from human to human, triggering a pandemic, in which millions of people might die.

In Africa, the strain has been found in Nigeria, Egypt and Niger, while several countries have stepped up surveillance measures to fight the disease.

An audit of every SADC member state showed each country had prepared a risk plan and put together task teams to investigate the virus, said Margaret Nyirenda, director in the SADC secretariat's food, agriculture and national resources directorate.

The task teams had also prepared budgets which they put to their cabinets, she said. Regional ministers of health and livestock had been directed by the secretariat to meet in Durban in April to implement the recommendations of the workshop.

These include large scale culling of poultry in affected areas, restriction on poultry trade, tighter border controls and assistance to less prepared countries from those better placed to face the epidemic, said Nyirenda.

Source: Xinhua