Indonesian authorities slow to react to bird flu outbreak

Aug 28 2006

According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), Indonesian authorities have confirmed another case of a human case of the H5N1 bird flu virus.

The latest case in a 6-year-old girl from Bekasi, West Java Province, brings the total number of confirmed cases in Indonesia to 60 of which 46 have been fatal.

The child became sick on 6 August and was hospitalized on 11 August and is now recovering.

As yet no light has been cast on the source of her infection.

Following the discovery of a number of infected birds in Cigadog and Cijambe villages in the area of Cikelet in Garut, as many as 2,000 birds are to be culled.

More than 3,500 chickens, ducks, and birds were culled in the same villages earlier in the month.

Authorities also plan to vaccinate up to 70,000 birds; apparently 230,000 birds have already been vaccinated as a precaution.

Many experts are critical of how long it is taking health authorities to respond to outbreaks.

In one case it appears that it was 7 weeks before officials were alerted to the deaths of hundreds of chickens and three people and before anything was done to try to control the spread of the virus.

The three who died were buried before samples could be taken, and two others from the area who tested positive for bird flu have both since died; at least 10 others are suspected to have bird flu.

That the authorities were unaware of such a massive outbreak only serves to demonstrate how poorly health workers are coping with containing the disease in the sprawling archipelago.

It seems health facilities in these remote and inaccessible area are scant and public awareness of bird flu and what to do when an outbreak occurs is non-existent.

Of the 64 confirmed human deaths from bird flu around the world this year, 35 have been in Indonesia and the country has now overtaken Vietnam as the country with the most deaths since the global outbreak began in 2003.

Vietnam has not recorded a human death for more than 18 months, while Indonesia's death toll is rising steadily and appears all set to continue to do so for the time being.

Twenty nine of Indonesia's 33 provinces now have bird flu outbreaks at epidemic levels in their poultry populations and the surveillance of animal and human health sectors only exists in a fraction of the more than 420 districts around the country.

But even with international donor funding, pushing this figure to 150 many doubt the Indonesian government's commitment to fighting the disease.

The government's proposed budget for next year has been cut by 15 per cent from this year's and many experts thought it was grossly inadequate to begin with.

Indonesia has repeatedly called on the international community to contribute more money.

The only positive sign at present is that the disease has yet to mutate into a form that could cause human-to-human transmission and thus a global pandemic.