THE way that we are handling the bird flu crisis leaves a lot to be desired.

First we failed apparently to prevent the dreaded H5N1 virus from entering the country. We also failed to detect when it first entered Pakistan, presumably through migratory birds.

Then after the disease was first discovered, not in migratory birds but on poultry farms - and in two places simultaneously - in the NWFP, we failed to prevent its spread to other poultry farms on the outskirts of Islamabad.

Having failed to prevent the spread of the bird flu infection from migratory birds to local poultry, and then from one poultry farm to another poultry farm in this northern region, we are now proposing that all public and private schools in Islamabad should be closed in order to prevent the spread of the bird flu from child to child!

One does not have to be an expert in viral medicine to know that so far, no where in the world has the H5N1 avian virus mutated yet to spread from person to person. And even the spread of the disease from poultry to humans is far from what one would call an epidemic, let alone a pandemic.

It is thus more logical to focus on adopting other preventive measures for our people, as many other countries have done, like ensuring that all those who handle poultry - alive or slaughtered - should use protective gloves and masks. Closing down schools en masse to prevent the spread of bird flu is jumping the gun.

It is just like trying to discover a vaccine for humans against bird flu. One does not have to be a vaccine expert to wonder how a vaccine can be developed for a disease that does not yet exist because the H5N1 virus is not known to have spread from person to person at this point in time.

It is more logical for scientists to work on discovering an effective vaccine for poultry against the H5N1 virus, if one does not already exist. All the scare about humans getting the virus from infected chickens has diverted attention from the more serious problem, which is that the H5N1 virus is still basically an avian disease which is threatening to wipe out and kill the poultry industry in Pakistan and in the world. (More than 200 million domestic fowl are reported to have been killed worldwide so far to help stem the spread of H5N1 infection in birds).

As one American expert was recently quoted to have said: “The whole problem with the topic is the blurring of the distinction between birds and people. I’d be worried if I was a bird...”

Given our poor record in dealing with health and sanitary issues in general, it was a foregone conclusion that the dreaded H5N1 avian flu would eventually infect our poultry industry. It was only a matter of time.

If we accept the fact that the H5N1 avian flu was introduced in Pakistan through the most commonly cited presumed cause, i.e., migratory birds, why didn’t we detect the presence of the disease first among migratory birds entering the country?

Not a single case of avian flu in migratory birds had been reported in Pakistan before the first cases of H5N1 were reported in chicken farms in Charsadda and Abbottabad in the NWFP in late February.

Even when we knew that the H5N1 had finally landed in the country, we apparently failed to prevent its spread. One-and-a- half months after the first cases of the disease were reported in the NWFP, avian flu is now being reported in chicken farms on the outskirts of Islamabad, first in Sihala and more recently in Tarlai.

It is obvious that monitoring agencies tasked to detect the presence of the H5N1 avian flu among migratory birds entering our country had failed, and thus did not sound the alert against infection of our poultry by a virus that we knew well in advance could devastate our poultry industry.

The photograph in an English newspaper of a pile of dead chickens carelessly dumped on a roadside in Rawalpindi city only confirmed the negligent and non-vigilant manner in which we respond to such potentially human life-threatening and economically devastating issues.

Whether or not these dead chickens were actually infected with H5N1, they should have been disposed of very carefully to avoid any risk of infecting humans.

Also, nothing yet has been done to get rid of domestic fowls that are being kept by some residents in Islamabad in their gardens and backyards. Such domestic fowls can be seen running around the roadside not only on the outskirts of Islamabad but also in urban residential sectors such as I-8, 1-9 and I-10, posing potential dangers to the general public.

Instead of closing down schools, effort should be focused on ensuring that residents do not come into direct contact with live poultry. A closer look at the 190 over people in the world who are known so far to have been infected with bird flu and the 110 human casualties of bird flu will show that they are largely those people who had close and prolonged contact with infected birds, such as poultry farm workers.

Further evidence of our inefficient response to the bird flu crisis is provided by the contradictory figures given by officials about the number of chickens culled recently in Tarlai.

Three different English newspapers last Friday quoted three different figures of chickens culled in Tarlai, 40,000, 25,000 and 20,000 respectively! It may not matter much to the general public how many chickens are actually culled but it does reflect on the seriousness and efficiency with which we are dealing with the bird flu crisis.

Given the fact that monitoring agencies have apparently failed to detect the presence of the disease among migratory birds entering the country and thus sound the alert against infection of our poultry by a virus that we knew well in advance could devastate our poultry industry, what assurance do we have that the same negligence or slackness with which we have dealt with the avian flu so far would not affect efforts to combat the H5N1 virus and prevent its spread to other chicken farms in other districts and provinces in the country?

Are we, for instance, ensuring that the transport of poultry from one district to another and from one province to another is prohibited? Are we vigilant enough to detect each and every outbreak of the H5N1 virus in any part of the country? Are we actually culling all the stocks of poultry which have been found to be infected? Are we ensuring that all domestic chicken coops are destroyed and that our poultry handlers all observe the strictest hygiene measures like donning of masks, gloves and protective overalls?

More importantly, are we ensuring that the H5N1 virus does not become endemic to Pakistan, if it has not already become endemic? Are we doing anything to ensure that all our poultry are being vaccinated with the appropriate vaccines in order to prevent uninfected poultry from being infected with the H5N1 avian flu in the next migratory season?

At the same time, are we ensuring that the vaccines being administered to our poultry are safe? Given the complaint by some poultry farmers, which was reported in Dawn, that the outbreak of bird flu was a reaction to the imported vaccines which the farmers were told to administer to their poultry flocks, we definitely need to investigate the matter further to check if poultry vaccines are not the source of the bird flu.

We cannot afford to be slack in any of the above measures anymore. H5N1 avian flu has arrived in this country and any lack in vigilance will only facilitate the spread of the virus from poultry farm to poultry farm, and eventually - may God forbid - from poultry to humans. Inability to stop further outbreaks of the virus will also mean indefinite economic losses to our poultry industry, as well as the loss of an important source of protein for our people.

NEW ORLEANS: Each time the three-year-old gets in the bathtub, she thinks she’s going to drown. Monica whimpers when her grandmother turns on the faucet, sobbing softly at first, then wailing as the tub begins to fill.

“She cries and cries. ‘Don’t be crying,’ I tell her. ‘I gotta wash your hair,’” says her exasperated grandmother, Ruth May Smith.

There’s no use telling her she won’t drown; the word isn’t yet part of the toddler’s vocabulary. And it won’t do much good to tell her that grandma will take care of her, either; Monica learned the hard way that those she loves can’t always protect her.

There were seven children inside the family’s Gulf Coast home on August 29 when the 30-foot wave, unleashed by Hurricane Katrina, crashed down upon it. As the walls began to crumble, the older children swam out. Monica, the littlest, was still inside with her grandmother and two aunts. None could swim.

The toddler went under. She would have drowned if not for a family friend who dove in, fished her out and placed her inside a floating cooler.

In her plastic ark, the girl bobbed to safety — but the storm’s high water mark is still imprinted inside her, as it is in thousands of others who survived the storm.

Some 1.2 million children under 18 were living in counties rendered disaster zones by Katrina. As many as eight per cent, or 100,000, are expected to develop post-traumatic stress disorder, according to one assessment.

Most experts say the toll is likely to be higher. Of the first 1,000 children screened by the Louisiana State University Health Sciences Centre, 27 per cent displayed symptoms of trauma, including nightmares, flashbacks, heightened anxiety and bedwetting, says Dr Joy Osofsky, a professor of paediatrics and psychiatry at LSU’s Harris Centre for Infant Mental Health.

A study by the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University and the Children’s Health Fund compared children displaced by Katrina with other kids surveyed in urban Louisiana in 2003. Katrina’s victims were more than twice as likely to have behavioural or conduct problems; the same was true of depression or anxiety.

How children respond and the severity of their reaction varies widely. But eight months after Katrina, patterns are beginning to surface.

For teenagers, depression is setting in, as they realise it could be years before they’re back in their homes, if ever.

Elementary- and middle-school children are struggling with the loss of their toys. They battle nightmares and intrusive thoughts. Their anxiety comes out in physical symptoms, like recurring stomach aches.

For children under six, their faith in their parents’ ability to protect them has been shattered. To make themselves feel secure, they regress, sticking close to their parents and returning to behaviour they’d previously outgrown, such as thumbsucking and bedwetting.

“Huffing and puffing and blowing your house down is only supposed to happen in fairy tales. Now, anything can happen,” says Dr Lynne Rubin, a founding member of the New York Disaster Counselling Coalition, which counselled children after 9/11.

During the London blitz in the Second World War, Anna Freud, the daughter of the famed psychoanalyst, observed that children sent to safe homes in the countryside fared worse than those who waited out the bombings in shelters alongside their mothers.

It was the separation, rather than the exposure to the war, that proved more traumatic.

More than 5,000 children were separated from their families in the hectic days after Katrina made landfall, according to the Centre for Missing and Exploited Children. Those who lost a parent often become unmoored, focusing their angst on their surviving parent.

When her father takes a nap, eight-year-old Gabrielle Riley circles the bedroom, on edge. Eventually, she quietly turns the doorknob. “I just go in his room and see if he’s OK. But sometimes he doesn’t answer me so I just scream loud, ‘Daddy are you OK?’” she explains.

Gabrielle’s mother caught pneumonia during the family’s evacuation to Houston and died in her sleep. Ever since, Gabrielle has been unable to fall asleep by herself, curling up with her grandmother, instead. It’s a recurring pattern, say child psychologists, as children retreat into what is most familiar.

More than 60 years ago, Anna Freud had a second observation: While children who hunkered down in London’s bomb shelters with their guardian fared better emotionally than those sent out of harm’s way, the children who did best of all were those whose mothers stayed calm. If the mother showed fear, the child sensed the threat implicitly — and symptoms of trauma surfaced later.

Like youngsters in London, many child victims of the story sensed the threat in their parents’ reaction and, in Katrina’s aftermath, in TV footage.

April Ocker didn’t let her daughter out of her sight during the hurricane. But since then, five-year-old Breanna has harboured a horrible fear: “I’m afraid my Mommy is going to go away and not come back,” says the little girl, her brown bangs covering saucer-like eyes.

Sitting nearby, her mother tries to comfort her, stroking her hair. But it’s hard to reassure a child who saw trees crashing around her family’s trailer, parked 5-1/2 miles from the beach in Pass Christian on Mississippi’s Gulf Coast. Katrina nearly wiped the quaint city off the map.

With the hurricane bearing down, April placed Breanna and her eight-year-old brother inside the trailer’s bathtub, hoping the tub’s strong walls would protect them. The tub survived, but the children are scarred.

When it rains, Breanna says, she hides under the coffee table. She can fall asleep only in her mother’s bed; she trails her mother like a shadow. April occasionally gets called to Breanna’s school, three minutes from home, because of the girl’s sobbing.—AP