Bird Flu Monitoring efforts in Africa

The Financial Express today has a story on African efforts to monitor for H5N1 bird flu virus--including efforts in South Africa and Egypt.

In South Africa, the paper reports that "agriculture officials have been conducting random sampling of wild birds along the country's coastline and monitoring the health of domestic poultry."

In Egypt, "George Majid, Egypt's environment minister, said the government had been taking measures in co-operation with the American Navy Research Centre (Namro), based in Cairo, to take samples from migrating birds and conduct laboratory checks to ensure Egypt was free of the H5N1 virus."

News services are claiming that H5N1 may already be in Africa (something I pointed out here earlier). The most recent statement to this effect is in this Financial Express article and comes from Bernard Vallat, director general of the World Organisation for Animal Health.