Help world's children and fight bird flu -experts (Reuters)

By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Correspondent

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Moving swiftly against age-old child killers such as diarrhea and pneumonia could help the world get ready to combat a bird flu pandemic, health experts said on Tuesday.

"We can't do anything about stopping avian flu if it comes in the next two years. But we can save 6 million child lives and we can do something about pandemic flu if it comes in the next five to 10 years," said Dr. Nils Daulaire, president and chief executive officer of the Global Health Council.

This, in turn, could help create the capacity to cope with outbreaks of new diseases such as H5N1 avian flu. The key lies in building up the so-called public health system, the experts said.

H5N1 avian influenza has moved across several Asian countries, decimating flocks of poultry, and now has been found in Europe, in Romania and possibly Greece. So far it does not infect people easily but it has sickened at least 117 in four countries and killed 60 of them.

If it becomes a human disease, it has the potential to kill millions or tens of millions of people within a few months.

It will take at least six months to make a vaccine against it. Only two drugs reduce its effects and they are in short supply. Quarantines are unlikely to help much and influenza spreads quickly.

In other words, the world will be helpless to stop H5N1 if it comes before vaccine and drug production can be ramped up, virtually all experts agree. And hospitals, clinics and other health systems are already stretched to capacity, so a pandemic will be difficult to cope with.

But ramping up the capacity to make and distribute vaccines and drugs will have immediate benefits on other, equally deadly but less acute diseases, global health specialists said.

"Every three seconds a child dies," Daulaire told a briefing sponsored by the National Press Foundation. "They die from pneumonia. They die from diarrhea. They are dying from neonatal causes. They are dying from malaria.

"And yet we have all these terrific interventions that could save lives today."

In June, World Health Organization researchers published a study showing that 6 million children who die each year from preventable diseases could be saved if richer nations gave another $5 billion a year.

SAVING TWO-THIRDS OF CHILDREN

Their formula is based on a few actions: Vaccinating every child against diseases such as measles and pneumonia, treating every child with diarrhea with rehydration salts, providing inexpensive antibiotics, antimalarial drugs and insecticide-treated mosquito nets, ensuring every child is breast-fed from birth and giving malnourished children low-cost vitamin A supplements.

The $5 billion does not include upgrades to health systems, they said, but not much would be needed to deliver many of the drugs, vaccines and vitamins.

"That infrastructure has to start in countries where conditions are the worst," Daulaire said. Some of these are countries where H5N1 avian influenza now affects people, such as Vietnam and Indonesia.

And putting these into place would have the effect of helping the world better cope with the inevitable pandemics of disease, whether they are bird flu, another type of influenza, or something completely new and unexpected.

"The whole thing can be dampened significantly," Daulaire said.