Sick hogs can be a mixing vessel for avian and human influenzas. But, he added, it was too early for "mass killing of pigs, which are a crucial part of farmers' livelihoods and of food security in Asia". The focus of the three-day meeting in Kuala Lumpur is how to protect labourers at farms and markets and to prepare physicians and vets for an epidemic.The WHO is searching for a strategy to keep the virus from leaping from animals to humans, and mutating into a more infectious hybrid."The virus has yet to develop efficient human-to-human transmission and there is still time for action," said a joint statement by the three UN groups organising the three-day conference in Malaysia: the Food and Agriculture Organisation, the WHO and the World Organisation for Animal Health known by its French acronym OIE.. With unregulated poultry farms and countless bazaars where fowl are sold live, then taken home by customers on crowded public transport, this is a recipe for disaster.In the remote Chinese province of Qinghai, where nearly 6,000 wild geese died last month, three million doses of bird flu vaccine have been distributed.
In May, thousands of demonstrators linked arms around Futenma to demand its closure, and a proposal to build a new base over a coral reef in a tiny fishing village has also brought protests which have continued for a year.The tensions were further exacerbated last summer when a military helicopter crashed into the grounds of Okinawa university and Okinawa police were barred from inspecting the crash site."We are sitting on a tinderbox here," Mr Chibana said "The military should leave.". International health experts have called for mass vaccinations of poultry across Asia to prevent bird flu from becoming a human pandemic. Bird flu is raging across Asia, where at least 55 humans have died since late 2003 after contact with sick poultry, and tens of millions of chickens have been culled. United Nations health experts warned at a medical conference in Kuala Lumpur that the situation is critical. Since then, the military has maintained an uneasy truce with islanders after agreeing to co-operate more closely with the Okinawa authorities in investigating crimes by its own personnel, and to return Futenma air base, which occupies 25 per cent of Okinawa's second city, Ginowan.But tensions have recently returned.
But some islanders said the latest incident called for more radical solutions."There is a lot of anger in Okinawa right now," said Shoichi Chibana, an assemblyman who campaigns for the removal of American bases. "People are afraid of these crimes because they just never stop, and they won't stop until the military leaves."More than 50,000 US military personnel and dependants, including 17,600 marines, are on Okinawa, which has a population of 1.3 million; the US military controls much of the land, sea and air.In 1995, two marines and a sailor kidnapped and gang-raped a 12-year-old girl before leaving her for dead in a crime that capped years of sexual assaults and which caused the largest anti-US demonstrations since the end of the Second World War. It is run by the Syrian Baath Party, which has used heavy-handed tactics to crack down against any form of dissent or instability.. The US Air Force has apologised to the family of a 10-year-old girl who was allegedly molested by one if its airmen in Okinawa at the weekend. The incident is the latest in a string of sexual assaults by American servicemen to have angered the inhabitants of the southern Japanese prefecture, which plays reluctant host to dozens of American military bases. Police arrested 27-year-old Sergeant Armando Valdez - who denies the assault - after the girl told her mother a drunken soldier had groped her and taken a photo of her naked chest in a car park in the city of Naha. Before that raid, security forces had been monitoring the Jund al-Sham for Jihad and Tawhid terrorist group and broke it up as the group planned bomb attacks in Damascus and its suburbs.Terrorist attacks are rare in this country. The latest violence followed Sunday's clashes that killed what Syria described as an Arab extremist, plus two Syrian soldiers, near the Lebanese border.