A four-nation veterinary network made up of China, Mongolia, South and North Korea is being formed to fight avian influenza, funded by a US$400,000 grant from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

The main diagnostic laboratory will be in Harbin, Heilongjiang Province, while the surveillance network will be headquartered in Beijing. The East Asia bloc is part of a larger regional system that also includes Southeast and South Asia.

Veterinary staff within the network will be trained in applying harmonized diagnostic and field surveillance tools, and the leading laboratory and surveillance focal points for national bird flu campaigns will meet twice each year to discuss progress. International experts will support countries in training, laboratory diagnosis and field surveillance.

The idea is to prompt laboratories to share research on bird flu and provide guidance to other countries in the region that may be at risk of infection, according to Dr. Sarah Kahn, an Australian veterinary consultant to the FAO's Animal Production and Health Division.

"We've seen China has done a lot of good work in bird flu research. We hope it can provide some related staff training for other countries in East Asia," said Kahn.

All the countries in the network should direct more research at detecting the infection in ducks and learning more about categories of the virus in wild birds. Good collaboration between laboratories is essential to both human and animal health, she stated.

Kahn said that while vaccination is the best way to prevent visible bird flu outbreaks, it is important to employ a sophisticated surveillance strategy to discover infections in birds that show no symptoms of the disease.

Hans-Gerhard Wagner, a FAO official working in Thailand, said that the recent outbreak of bird flu among tigers there served as a warning concerning the possibility of the virus jumping to other species. Thirty tigers in a private zoo in east Thailand died of bird flu last month after being fed raw chickens.

The Southeast Asia subregion of the surveillance system, set up in July, covers Cambodia, Laos, Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, Papua New Guinea, Philippines, Thailand, East Timor and Vietnam.

The soon-to-be-established network for South Asia will include Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Pakistan, Nepal and Sri Lanka.

China, Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia and Malaysia have all reported limited bird flu outbreaks since July, after a wider outbreak earlier this year.

About 32 Asian people have died of the H5N1 bird flu virus this year, according to the World Health Organization.

(China.org.cn, China Daily November 2, 2004)