January 18, 2007

Indonesia short of 1.1 billion bird flu vaccine doses

Indonesia is short of around 1.14 billion bird flu vaccine doses, the country's Bird Flu Campaign Management Unit at the Agriculture Department said.

Memed Zoelkarnain Hasan, Head of Communications at the unit, said that ideally the Indonesia would need 1.2 billion doses to deal with the bird flu problem. It has currently allocated only 60 million doses.

Currently, he said, there are around 300 million fowls threatened by the virus, each would have to be vaccinated four times a year.

Due to this vaccine limitation, the Agriculture Department would have to implement a targeted vaccination programme.

Moreover, efforts at bird flu prevention is hampered by the shortage of vaccine injection equipment, Memed said.

Injection equipment has to be changed from time to time or they would not be effective, he said.

The Agriculture Department may be seeking additional funds to be allocated to acquire more vaccines. The department's budget for fighting bird flu this year was 180 billion rupees (US$20 million).