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Since its emergence, H5N1 HPAI has attracted considerable public and media attention because the viruses involved have been shown to be capable of producing fatal disease in humans, which gives rise to the fear that the virus might acquire the capacity for sustained human-to-human transmission and thus cause a global influenza pandemic.

 

Driven by the fear of a possible human pandemic, responses to HPAI outbreaks have generally been top-down, heavy handed government interventions. Control measures have centred on stamping out which may entail large scale culling of infected flocks and in-contact flocks and the high concentration of poultry in certain areas has led to the culling of millions of animals at great expense. For low income countries in which poultry is raised primarily by smallholders, who are often poor, such measures may constitute a serious burden, and thus lead to socially unjust outcomes and / or be undermined.

 

In order to improve local and global and capacity for making evidence-based decisions on the control of HPAI (and other diseases with epidemic potential), which inevitably have major social and economic impacts in particular on the poor, the UK Department for International Development (DFID) has funded a multi-disciplinary and collaborative HPAI research project in Southeast Asia and Africa.