Indonesia prepares hospitals for bird flu care, checks
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Indonesia is preparing 44 hospitals across the sprawling archipelago for treatment and detection of bird flu after recording its first deaths from the virus, the health minister said on Thursday.
Siti Fadillah Supari also told reporters authorities were yet to determine how a government official and his two young daughters living in a Jakarta suburb contracted the H5N1 strain of the virus.
All three died earlier this month, but the official’s wife and son have not shown any signs of the disease. The family lived in Tangerang, a suburb about 30 km (20 miles) from the centre of Jakarta, a city of 10 million.
“We will still investigate and do surveillance…We don’t know the cause,” Supari said.
Speaking at the same news conference, World Health Organisation (WHO) representative Georg Petersen said: “It is an alarming situation. It shows us that most countries can get this infection and we need all to be alert and prepared.”
Avian influenza, which arrived in Asia in late 2003, has so far also killed 40 people in Vietnam, half of them since December, 12 in Thailand and 4 Cambodians.
China announced in June that it had discovered the H5N1 virus in domestic geese in Xinjiang. More than 13,000 geese were slaughtered to curb its spread. It has also been grappling with a separate outbreak in migratory birds in the neighbouring province of Qinghai.
CONCERN IN CHINA
The WHO has expressed concern over China’s handling of the outbreaks. “As far as I know, the Ministry of Agriculture has not sent any samples to any international reference labs or any FAO or WHO collaborating centres,” WHO China spokesman Roy Wadia said.
“I really can’t say what sort of time table they’re operating under in this case, all I can say is that we would hope that such information would be shared sooner rather than later.”
Health authorities fear the virus will mutate and become easily passed between humans, which could cause a pandemic, but Supari had said on Wednesday that the results showed it was not a new virus and therefore there was no need to worry about human-to-human transmission.
Agriculture Minister Anton Apriyantono said the government had decided to carry out mass culling of farm animals within a radius of three kilometres (two miles) of affected farms and compensate farmers.
The Indonesian parliament on Thursday also approved 134.5 billion rupiah ($13.71 million) in emergency and additional state budget funds to fight bird flu.
HUMAN TRANSMISSION?
WHO’s Petersen said on Thursday: “We have not seen any infection spreading outside intimate family contact. So we don’t say it’s a human to human transmission.”
But health experts are concerned.
“Basically, the anxiety is person-to-person transfer,” Sian Griffiths, director of the School of Public Health at the Chinese University in Hong Kong, told Reuters.
“And how do you stop any potential spread before it gets into the population and becomes an epidemic.”
Many Indonesians, even in cities like Jakarta, keep a few chickens or other poultry in their yards. Jakarta residents expressed mixed feelings about the spread of bird flu.
Last month, Indonesia, the world’s fourth most populous country with 220 million people, had reported its first human case in a poultry worker, but the man did not develop symptoms and is healthy.
The agriculture ministry has reported sporadic H5N1 virus outbreaks killing more than nine million fowl in 21 provinces, out of a total of 33, across the archipelago since late 2003.
In the past, Indonesian policy favoured vaccinating animals rather than culling to stop the spread, due to lack of funds to compensate farmers. The WHO has questioned the effectiveness of vaccines and say culling is the best weapon.
The virus has already jumped species in Indonesia and was discovered in pigs in May on densely populated Java island.
Pigs can carry human flu viruses, which can combine with avian viruses, swap genes and create virulent new strains. However, pig farming in Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim country, is not widespread. Islam regards pigs as unclean.
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