Bird Flu Will Arrive Through a Gap in the Statute Book

On 7th March 2025 the journal Science carried a policy forum by Jesse L. Goodman, Rebecca Katz, Lawrence O. Gostin, Nicole Lurie and three co-authors, "Prepare now for a potential H5N1 pandemic", warning that the virus had reached dairy cattle in the United States and that the time to act was before, and not after, sustained transmission between human beings. Their first point is technical, since egg-based vaccine production cannot supply the globe in the weeks a pandemic allows. Their second is legal, and it concerns Pakistan directly: the powers to detect an outbreak, to compel its reporting, to cull the affected flock and to pay the man whose flock has been culled must be settled by statute in advance, not improvised by executive order inside a crisis.

Very unfortunately, Pakistan carries the exposure and has never written the law.

The exposure is already counted

The Pakistan Economic Survey 2024-25 puts the commercial poultry population at 2.17 billion birds, in a sector worth Rs 923.5 billion which employs about 1.5 million people and supplies 43.3 per cent of the country’s meat. Avian influenza is no hypothetical visitor there: the first highly pathogenic outbreak, of H7N3 in 1994, killed 3.2 million birds; low pathogenic H9N2 was first reported in 1998 and has circulated ever since; and H5N1 struck repeatedly between 2006 and 2008, taking a farm at Mansehra in July 2007 where 14,000 birds died and 35,000 more were destroyed.

In December 2007 the Ministry of Health informed the World Health Organization of a cluster of suspected human cases around Peshawar; the Disease Outbreak News of 15th and 27th December 2007 records that the illness began in a veterinarian who had helped to cull chickens and spread to brothers who nursed him, one of whom, a man of 25, died on 28th November 2007.

Pakistan’s first laboratory-confirmed human infection with H5N1 began with a culling operation.

The virus never left. Sampling of 120 layer flocks at Karachi across 2018 and 2019 found avian influenza virus in 254 of 960 tracheal swabs, as the Iranian Journal of Veterinary Research reported in 2021. A poultry worker of 36 in Narowal district was found carrying H9N2 in 2015, as Emerging Infectious Diseases reported in January 2019, for one reason and no other: a research team was swabbing 117 poultry workers. No statutory duty found that man; a grant-funded study did.

Two statute books that do not speak to each other

The animal side is governed federally by the Pakistan Animal Quarantine (Import and Export of Animals and Animal Products) Ordinance, 1979 (Ordinance No. XLIX of 1979), promulgated on 17th September 1979, which is a border instrument and nothing more: Section 3 lets the Federal Government regulate the import or export of any animal or animal product by notification in the official Gazette, and Section 6 lets a Quarantine Officer order the destruction of diseased animals. It says nothing about an outbreak in a shed at Sheikhupura, and obliges nobody to tell any health authority anything.

Older still, and in field federally and outside Punjab, is the Glanders and Farcy Act, 1899, passed on 20th March 1899, the only place in the federal statute book where a private citizen owes a duty to report animal disease; its schedule covers one equine infection with no bearing on poultry.

Punjab alone has modernised. The Punjab Animal Health Act, 2019 (Act XXXII of 2019), passed on 25th November 2019 and gazetted on 13th December 2019, repeals that Act of 1899 within the province by Section 27, schedules 33 “scheduled diseases” of which avian influenza is one, imposes by Section 10 a duty of report on the person in charge of an animal and on the veterinary practitioner called to treat it, permits euthanasia of a zoonotically infected animal by Section 21(3), and bars animal markets inside a notified controlled area by Section 21(4).

Three defects run through even that Act. The Section 10 duty bites only inside a “controlled area” which Government must first notify, so an outbreak in an unnotified district generates no duty at all. The report climbs to the Chief Veterinary Officer and stops there, no provision obliging anyone to tell a District Health Officer or the National Institute of Health that avian influenza sits in a flock whose handlers the veterinary officer has just interviewed. And a breach of traceability rules under Section 6(2) attracts up to Rs 200,000 where the escape of a pathogen from a laboratory under Section 21(2) attracts up to Rs 20,000.

The human side is thinner still. The Epidemic Diseases Act, 1897 (Act III of 1897), passed on 4th February 1897 and unaltered since, gives the Provincial Government at Section 2 one discretionary power to take such special measures as it thinks necessary, with no surveillance provision and no notification duty; the National Institute of Health (Re-organization) Act, 2021 obliges the Centre for Disease Control by Section 12(3) to maintain a national surveillance system but places no duty of report on anyone, and for the reasons best known to the Ministry no rules have been framed under Section 29; and the National Disaster Management Act, 2010 (Act XXIV of 2010), reached for during the times of COVID-19, is a climatic instrument with no veterinary capability in it.

Clinician reporting exists only in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Public Health Surveillance and Response Act, 2017 and the Punjab Infectious Diseases (Prevention and Control) Act, 2020, neither drafted to receive a veterinary report; and the six zoonotic priority diseases, influenza among them, are notified administratively by the Ministry and scheduled to no enactment whatsoever.

Since the veterinary report under Section 10 of the Punjab Animal Health Act, 2019 travels only upward inside the livestock department, and since no enactment in field anywhere in Pakistan obliges a veterinary authority to notify a health authority of a zoonotic detection, therefore the “One Health” loop is broken at precisely the joint where it must hold, and the animal-human interface is left to goodwill between departments instead of duty imposed by law. That hence needs serious reconsideration.

The farmer who will not report

Neither the Ordinance of 1979 nor the Act of 2019 offers a rupee of compensation to the owner of a destroyed flock. A power to cull unaccompanied by a duty to compensate is, from the farmer’s side of the table, indistinguishable from confiscation; and a confiscation is not reported, it is anticipated. The farmer who sees unexplained mortality sells the rest of his birds into the live bird trade, the very trade in which a 2020 survey in Influenza and Other Respiratory Viruses found antibodies to H9 in 15.5 per cent of butchers at 161 stalls in Chakwal district alone.

Compensation is therefore not welfare; it is the price of information, and Pakistan has declined to pay it.

What the Regulations require, and the score Pakistan was given

Pakistan has been a State Party to the “International Health Regulations” since 15th June 2007. Article 5(1) with Part A of Annex 1 requires the “core capacities” to detect events involving disease or death above expected levels and to report them immediately; Article 6(1) requires notification to the World Health Organization within 24 hours, a new influenza virus being always notifiable; and Article 4(2 bis), in field for Pakistan from 19th September 2025, obliges States Parties to adjust their domestic legislative arrangements accordingly. The duty to legislate is textual, not donor-driven.

The second Joint External Evaluation of May 2023 scored Pakistan at 195 of 450 across 19 technical areas, and scored the capacity styled legal instruments at 2 out of 5, meaning a legal mapping conducted and documented and nothing further.

The second National Action Plan for Health Security 2024-2028 adopts “One Health” among its guiding principles and is costed at PKR 31,444,897,816. A costed plan is useful, but it creates no duty enforceable against a veterinary officer who does not lift the telephone.

Where the bridge belongs

The bridge belongs in the Draft National Health Security and Infectious Disease Contingency Act 2026, which already holds the sockets for it: Section 13 establishes a National Notifiable Disease List; Section 16 imposes the duty of medical practitioners to give information; Section 20 addresses animal diseases; Schedule A names influenza A/H5N1 expressly; and Section 1 answers the devolution objection by applying the Act within the provinces on and from endorsement by the Council of Common Interests under Article 154 of the Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, 1973.

In the light of the above, it is urgently required that two amendments be made before that Bill is moved. First, Section 20 must be recast as a reciprocal duty obliging every Chief Veterinary Officer and every Quarantine Officer under the Ordinance of 1979 to notify the National Focal Person within 24 hours of laboratory confirmation of a scheduled zoonotic disease, obliging the Focal Person to notify the veterinary authority in return, and carrying express power to close live bird markets during a declared alert, since Section 21(4) of the Act of 2019 reaches only Punjab. Secondly, a compensation section must be inserted on the model of Section 58 of the same draft, which already compensates at market value where property is destroyed, and extended to poultry culled under any enactment, because without payment there is no reporting and without reporting there is no surveillance.

The American authors write for a country whose problem is that it may act too slowly. Pakistan’s problem is worse, because our state functionaries could not act quickly even if they wished to; no enactment in field tells the veterinarian who confirms H5N1 at Sheikhupura that he owes the health department a word about it. The next H5N1 case here will, on the pattern of December 2007, be a man who culled birds, and when he reaches a hospital his physician will learn what the veterinary department already knew by reading it in the newspaper.