Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
to rethink the relevant provisions under the north american Free trade agreement
(naFta) and the wto.
consumer groups have a key duty in this context to elevate the public's
consciousness about health and to promote responsible consumer behaviour. the
price of reining in the spread of avian influenza or future threats may yield smaller
tomatoes and fewer chicken eggs, which may perhaps be a reasonable cost to the
consumers in wealthy countries.
the establishment of a joint wHo/Fao commission could reduce the incidence
meantime, individual country guidelines on (international) standards on antibiotics
and vaccination in agriculture must be implemented in close consultation with the
domestic farming community—which not only is responsible for operationalising
new rules but which will also experience their effects on its bottom line. It is one
thing to get farmers and agronomists in canada to agree to abide by these rules and
quite another in southeast asia, say, where the HPaI virus has become endemic and
where the smallholder poultry industry accounts for some 70 percent of the total
chicken production and involves some 200 million poor farmers—with little or no
access to preventive treatment, disease information, and veterinary services (Fao
and oIe 2005a). this makes civil society's advocacy and monitoring efforts critical
for the success of any national action plan.
Too Little, Too Late: Global Vaccine Scarcity
the trouble with the H5n1 virus, unlike with the more common varieties of avian
influenza, is that the vulnerable age group cannot be predicted—which means that
any individual who comes into contact with the virus is at risk, although in turkey in
January 2006 there was significantly higher mortality among those younger than 15.
For the U.S. alone, this translates into a need for at least 300 million doses of vaccine,
which is the amount the whole world together produces in a year (Garrett 2005a).
Furthermore, vaccines are produced commercially in just nine countries—australia,
canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the netherlands, the United Kingdom, and
the United States—home to barely 12 percent of the world's population, while
companies still lack financial incentives to invest in a product that may never reach
entire world market for vaccines, from polio to measles to influenza, made up less
than 2 percent of the global pharmaceutical trade (Garrett 2005a).
Indeed, if the entire U.S. vaccine production system was devoted to making a
vaccine to combat an avian influenza pandemic, it could inoculate barely 5 percent
of its population (butler 2005).
the U.S. government was stockpiling the vaccine;
but if American vaccine production were to falter, as it did in the 2004 influenza
season, it could not rely on canada and Germany to bail it out as in 2005, because,
in a 'global scramble for vaccine', governments might block foreign access to their
supplies, ban exports, nationalise the domestic production facilities, or refuse to
share their vaccine (just as washington did in 1976, in anticipation of the H1n1
swine influenza) (Garrett 2005a; Osterholm 2005).
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