VOA trains correspondents on bird flu reporting
FOR the third time in less than two years, the Hausa Service of the Voice of America (VOA) will be in Kano to avail indigenous journalists and its teeming listeners across the Northern region of its field operations .
A high-powered delegation from Washington, headquarters of the VOA, is being led by Head of the Hausa section, Mr. Sunday Dare to conduct a two day training for health correspondents on the reporting of avian influenza, otherwise known as bird flu.
The training which kicks off tomorrow is to equip the correspondents with requisite reportorial skills on the reporting of the disease. Two health correspondents - Nasiru Muhammad and Rabi Abdullahi Bature will represent Triumph newspapers.
Like HIV/AIDS, bird flu is caused by the transmission of the HN51 virus from animals to men. Before its outbreak in Hong Kong couple of years ago, its potential danger went unrealized and unremarked by most people, scientists and the media.
The influenza virus originated in birds. Virologists believe it emanated from water fowls. They see these birds as ‘reservoirs’ of infection that carry all types of influenza with no side-effects. These were spread to the rest of animals through the birds faeces, so horses, ferrets, seals, pigs and human beings got the disease.
According to studies, the human cells do not have the receptor that would enable them catch avian flu directly. For this reason, other animals with the receptor play intermediary role in transmitting the disease.
For instance, when a pig rolls in the dropping of a duck, it becomes infected and on coming into contact with a farmer, it passes the virus onto him. A new complex scanario is when a pig contracts flu from the farmer while it has got avian flu from another animal. This makes it a receptor of two types of flu. In the Hong Kong flu, the transmission scenario was more complex as there were seven genes from a human virus and one from a duck. These contributed to the rotation of a new hybrid that scientists and virologists are still working round the clock to understand.