Kazakhs say ready for gravest bird flu scenario
16 Mar 2006 10:54:55 GMT

ASTANA, March 16 (Reuters) - Kazakhstan's top health official said on Thursday the Central Asian country was prepared to withstand the gravest scenario of having to treat up to a million people this year should bird flu spark a pandemic.

Birds in Kazakhstan were hit by an outbreak of the virus last year. However, none of the country's 15 million citizens were infected then.

"A mass migration of birds will start in about a week, 10 or 15 days, especially from Southeast Asia. They will basically fly across the whole of our country," Kazakhstan's top sanitary official, Anatoly Belonog, told reporters in the capital Astana.

"If you take our country, we can expect -- and that's the 'gravest' forecast -- about a million infected people. We are ready for this number of patients, which is possible." [my emphais and comment: what's he saying here? a million infected from contact with birds? Nowhere has that happened, not even in China, which has had the most cases of fowl and human infections. Is he working with some other info or scenario in mind?]

Under this year's preventive plan, the Kazakh government has equipped regional health and veterinary offices with new monitoring equipment. It has also set up working groups in each region to organise preventive measures, officials have said.