Millions could die

last updated 8 January 2015

Bangkok

A catastrophic global epidemic of avian flu is “very, very likely,” a top World Health Organization official said this week. Shigeru Omi, the WHO’s director for Asia and the Pacific, said that if the bird flu that has been killing chickens and ducks in Asia becomes transmittable from human to human, it could infect one-third of the world’s population and kill tens of millions of people. He said such a leap was increasingly probable because the virus has already proved to be quite adaptable, mutating with other viruses in birds. Every government should draw up plans now, the WHO said, for how to keep vital services staffed during an outbreak. The last big global pandemic was the 1918 outbreak of Spanish flu, which killed about 20 million.