China, UN Health Agency to Jointly Fight Infectious Diseases

The establishment of the WHO Collaborating Centre for Surveillance, Research and Training on Emerging Infectious Diseases will be formally announced at a ceremony tomorrow in the provincial capital, Guangzhou, the United Nations health agency said in an e-mailed statement today.

International health agencies are trying to work more closely with China to detect and prevent infectious diseases faster, particularly in the densely populated southern region. The H5N1 strain of avian flu, which has spread in birds across Asia, Europe and Africa this year, was first detected in a farmed goose a decade ago in Guangdong, where severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, may have first jumped to humans in 2002.

``SARS has made the situation in terms of research even more urgent in that part of China,'' said Roy Wadia, a WHO spokesman. The virus that caused SARS led to 774 deaths in Asia and Canada in 2002 and 2003.

The center in Guangdong will perform research in areas such as the animal origins of SARS, and the transmission of influenza between animals and humans, and the disease burden of flu and other infections, the WHO said in its statement. The center may eventually become a training base for neighboring countries.

Governments worldwide are being urged to prepare for a deadly flu pandemic amid concern over the H5N1 strain, which has killed 128 of the 225 people known to have been infected since 2003. China has reported 18 human H5N1 cases, 12 of them fatal.

`Milestone'

``The WHO collaborating center in Guangdong is a milestone in China's contribution to global public health,'' Huang Jiefu, China's vice-minister for health, said in the statement. ``It reflects our country's commitment to playing a prominent role in this regard, at an especially critical moment in public health history.''

Human cases provide an opportunity for H5N1 to mutate into a pandemic form that may kill millions of people, according to the WHO. Officials at the Geneva-based agency and elsewhere say that the world is now closer to another influenza pandemic than at any time since 1968, when the last of the previous century's three major ones occurred.

``We know from SARS and avian influenza that what happens in one country affects another,'' Shigeru Omi, WHO's regional director for the Western Pacific, said in the statement. ``China is helping WHO and the world implement lessons learned from recent emerging infectious diseases for the national, regional and global public health good.''