CAPE TOWN, South Africa, June 1 (Xinhua) -- Lack of healthcare infrastructures has turned to be a major block for Africans to tackle the deadly H5N1 virus that had been spreading to eight African nations, said experts here Thursday.

    Livestock and medical experts at the ongoing World Economic Forum African Summit said that the fight against avian influenza in Africa requested more labs and surveillance stations to be set up throughout the continent where infected cases had been found both in poultries and in human beings.

    "So far no laboratory can handle with the H5N1 virus out of South Africa and even the low-level labs dealing with ordinary H5 virus are not available in most African countries," said Idrissa Sow, African regional avian influenza official of the World HealthOrganization.

    Sow said in a special session titled "tackling bird flu" duringthe summit that sending poultry samples to Paris or other Europeancities for further identification would surely delay the necessaryresponse the governments should make.

    Thoko Didiza, minister for public works of South Africa, said that the continent should have an information collecting and surveillance network in place to tackle such emergent issues, taking into account that sub-Sahara Africa's weak healthcare system had made it difficult to fight against avian influenza, which have been found in Nigeria, Egypt, Cameroon, Niger, Burkina Faso, Cote Divoire, Djibouti and Sudan within four months.

    Earlier this month Djibouti reported its first human case of H5N1, the first confirmed human case in the Horn of Africa.

    The lethal virus has spread rapidly since late 2003 from Asia to Europe, the Middle East and Africa, claiming over 120 lives.

    WHO and other organizations worried that cash-strapped Africa, with insufficient surveillance and disease control capacity and the close proximity between animals and humans, could not handle the bird flu crisis without helps from the rest of the world. Enditem