African scientists say they face a race against time to protect the continent from bird flu, amid fears that the deadly virus could arrive within weeks as migrating fowl head south for the winter.
Ahead of a meeting today with donors in Nairobi to thrash out proposals for safeguards, they say the continent has no vaccine stocks and insufficient diagnostic facilities.
Dr Karim Toukara, an animal disease expert with the African Union, said: "We can say this is a new disease and no country can say they have capacity for all diseases." Several African countries have already banned poultry from European countries affected by the latest H5N1 outbreaks.
They fear the real risk lies with the migration of birds from Romania, Turkey and Greece - which have all confirmed bird flu - to Africa. Some species use the lakes of the Great Rift Valley in east Africa as a watering spot, while others fly to west Africa and farther south, before eventually returning to Asia.
Earlier this week, Joseph Domenech, chief of the UN's Food and Agriculture warned that East Africa needed urgent help to cope with the threat.
If the disease was allowed to gain a stranglehold on domestic flocks, he said, it would prove difficult to eradicate. "The close proximity between people and animals and insufficient surveillance and disease control capacities in eastern African countries create an ideal breeding ground for the virus."
War-torn regions of Somalia, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Southern Sudan, where the rule of law is weak, pose particular problems.
Dr Bernard Vallat, secretary general of the World Organisation of Animal Health, warned that Africa's farmers could be very badly hit and that the developed world had a responsibility to prevent the continent becoming a reservoir of infection.
"This could be very bad for the rural economies in many African regions," he said. "Also if this virus is able to become present in large numbers of animals, then the probability that it could mutate into a human-affecting form will be higher."
Dr Toukara said the priority was to alert small-scale farmers to the symptoms, raise funds to acquire an emergency stockpile of vaccines and to adapt existing surveillance programmes to include bird flu.
So far Kenya, Tanzania and the Democratic Republic of Congo have each halted imports of poultry from European countries affected by the virus. Sudan and Uganda are the latest to follow suit, banning all imports of fowl.