# 1952
Myanmar, also known as Burma, is a bird flu hot-zone country. Late last year they reported a human infection, a 7-year-old girl who eventually recovered, plus they've reported scattered outbreaks in poultry in the last couple of years.
Ruled by a military junta, Myanmar is a poor country, with few resources available to devote to avian flu surveillance, containment, or treatment.
Over the weekend Myanmar was struck by Cyclone Nargis, and the official death count stands at 15,000. Foreign aid workers, however, have been quoted as believing the death toll could reach 50,000.
A tragedy in its own right, but this also means that avian flu will (understandably) go to the back burner in that country for the foreseeable future. Outbreaks may not be reported or contained, and the world will have a significant blind spot in their fight against the avian flu menace.
This report from the TIMESONLINE.
Aid workers fear Burma cyclone deaths will top 50,000
Kenneth Denby, in Rangoon
Foreign aid workers in Burma have concluded that as many as 50,000 people died in Saturday’s cyclone, and two to three million are homeless, in a disaster whose scale invites comparison with the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.
The official death count after Cyclone Nargis is 15,000, and the Thai Foreign Minister says he has been told that 30,000 people are missing. But due to the incompleteness of the information from the stricken Irrawaddy delta, UN and charity workers in the city of Rangoon privately believe that the number will eventually be several times higher.
Andrew Kirkwood, country director of the British charity Save The Children told The Times: “I’d characterise it as unprecedented in the history of Myanmar and on an order of magnitude with the effect of the tsunami on individual countries. It might well be more dead than the tsunami caused in Sri Lanka.”
The death toll in Sri Lanka on Boxing Day 2004 was 31,000, second only to the 131,000 who died on the Indonesian island of Sumatra. Eleven countries were affected.
Four days after the Burma cyclone, which struck the flat agricultural area south of Rangoon, there is wretchedly little hard information about the victims. Seven townships have been designated as “priority one” disaster areas, because between 90 to 95 per cent of the buildings have been destroyed. “Anything less than 60 per cent destroyed is not being counted as a priority at this stage by the government, which gives some indication of the scale of the problem,” said Mr Kirkwood.
