David Nabarro Quotations

We are losing the battle against this particular avian influenza outbreak. It is a very nasty bird flu virus.

We believe that it is starting to spread into Africa. I do hope that the Malawi case is not H5N1. If they are, then it's very serious.

There is a chance that we could have at least as many dying from communicable diseases as we had dying from the tsunami.

We are watching very closely to see how the disease associated with bird flu, when it hits humans, is evolving.

Every country in the world now needs to have its veterinary services on high alert for H5N1 to be sure they are not caught unawares.

There are some quite tricky challenges facing everybody working in Crimea and I shall be engaging with various government people.

What is important to me is there has been consensus and clarity, (and) much better coordination. We'll be much quicker to control avian influenza as a result.

If there is delay in getting culling teams out, delay in any part of the chain, even weeks, that could have great implications for the virus to spread.

The flu-casters would draw out the maps and keep people engaged at regular intervals ... beaming it from the WHO bunker.

This outbreak is moving ahead of efforts to control it.

Detecting and culling infected birds is still the key, and for that we have to compensate the owners of chicken whose flocks are killed. And we have to limit interaction between humans and birds, which is a huge challenge within an environment where people are used to living very close to their chickens.

The virus is moving quite substantially into new locations. My attention is pretty much equally divided between Europe, the southern Balkans and Black Sea area, Africa and south Asia.

We did discuss in China as well the importance of trying to restrict movements of chickens from areas that are infected, including across borders.

The real issue will be how the money is going to be managed and how we are going to coordinate.

What we've seen today is that the world really does care and wants to respond effectively to the threat of avian influenza, and a possible human pandemic.

H5N1 is causing a massive epidemic of lethal avian influenza.

The pace of fatalities appears to have fallen off quickly. But it is as yet unclear whether this is because the virus has modified or Turkey's approach has been successful.

Unless we are working as one, we don't get a good result.

I think there is a reasonably good chance ... that people will congeal around a set of basic principles and elements for what will become an international program which can then be presented to the donor community over the next couple of months.

It is certainly within the next six to 12 months; it could be earlier.

The $1.9 billion shows that the world cares greatly about the issues we face and that governments want to be sure that there is enough cash available to do everything they have to do to get the current epidemic of bird flu under control and make sure that we can prepare for a human pandemic.

We viewed this as the beginning. I'm not for a minute suggesting that the amounts of money we are talking about at the Beijing meet are all that's going to be needed.

There has been a shift in the susceptibility of wild fowl to H5N1. That's something that needs very careful attention if we're going to be ready for possible introduction of the bird flu virus in other locations through wild fowl.

To scale up vet services is a pretty tall order. They haven't had the level of investment they should have had during the last three or four decades. And you can't suddenly turn a switch to get vet services working well. You have got to train the vets. You have to build the systems.

Unfortunately I can't give you any precise information as to when the mutation of H5N1 to a form that can be transmitted between humans will actually take place.

We cannot have a vaccine against a pandemic virus until the pandemic virus appears.

We expect the next influenza pandemic to come at any time now.

The virus now has very definitely found its way into the African subcontinent, and we have a different situation that has emerged with even more H5N1 in our world.

The village knew about the dangers from these diseased birds, but somehow that knowledge wasn't turned fully into practice.

The threat is still there. Avian influenza will continue to come to Ukraine ... health services must be ready and prepared to deal with people who are infected with avian flu and to be ready for the possible arrival of human-to-human transmission.

African countries and the United Nations system must contribute resources to make up for this, in the hope that development partners will react rapidly.

Act as though a pandemic influenza will start tomorrow. Don't think we can wait around and not worry it won't start for six months or one year. Once, it starts it is too late to prepare.

The more I find out about an influenza pandemic and the lack of readiness, the more I am concerned. But I am more hopeful about the scope for international cooperation.

The money is only the beginning. The process of preparing is going to require very careful monitoring and review, and that's the work ahead.

And then there will be an interval of perhaps six months until we have a reasonable quantity of vaccine.

That outbreak was noted by the villagers, but was not handled because they didn't report it in time. We have to work harder on helping to convert knowledge into practice.

There will be an influenza pandemic sometime, but we don't know when. It could be mild, it could be severe, it could be extremely severe.

There is too much H5N1 virus in very close contact with humans in this region. We need, in a painstaking and careful way, to reduce the opportunities for this virus to be jumping across into the human population. That will in turn reduce the likelihood of a major pandemic.

It is quite feasible that H5N1 could mutate. The fact that it has taken some years should not lead you to believe that we are through the worst.

It may be more important to concentrate on the essentials of life for those who are living than it is to focus on the treatment of those who are sick.

It simply is telling us that the virus may be changing the way it interacts with humans. It does not tell us that the risk of a mutation that causes the pandemic is increasing or decreasing.

The last thing I want is to be truly alarmist. But the world is not really ready to deal with an avian pandemic.

I just think that every country in the world now needs to have its veterinary services on high alert for H5N1, to try to make sure that they don't get caught unawares and find that it gets into their poultry populations without knowing.