What's with this 'weak link' shit??? We're tough as nails...

Weak-link Laos gets U.S. funds for bird flu

HANOI (Reuters) - The United States will give Laos $3.4 million to fight deadly bird flu, including money for rapid-response teams to swoop on new outbreaks in the impoverished, jungle-clad country.

Details of the funding for the Communist-ruled country -- a weak link in Asia's fight against the virus which has killed more than 60 people since late 2003 -- were announced during a visit by U.S. Health Secretary Mike Leavitt. Leavitt is leading U.S. and U.N. health experts on a fact-finding mission in the region seen as the potential spark for a global human pandemic which could kill millions of people.

The World Health Organization has said that bird flu, which swept through parts of Asia in late 2003 and has spread since to Russia and Europe, is moving toward a form that could pass between humans.

But the WHO says only 40 of its 192 member countries have drawn up pandemic preparedness plans.

Some of the U.S. funds will go to develop a pandemic plan for Laos, a landlocked country where
most of the 5.6 million people live in remote rural areas.

Up to 100 rapid response teams would be trained and equipped to "institute emergency control measures in the event of an outbreak", the U.S. embassy in Laos said in a statement.

Leavitt, who earlier visited Thailand and Cambodia and will end his trip in Vietnam, where the bulk of the human deaths -- 41 -- have occurred, has urged governments to step up surveillance so any potential pandemic is snuffed out early.

"It's a function of having people trained to recognize the signs so that if it happens in a remote village in Laos or in Vietnam, or it happens in the United States for the first time, we are able to see it and respond to it quickly," he told CNN from the Lao capital Vientiane.