Indonesia remains at risk amid lesser bird flu outbreaks

Health specialists warn that the risk of bird flu remains high despite having fewer cases reported in Indonesia.

Health Minister Endang Rahayu Sedyaningsih said effective surveillance and measures to control the disease in poultry had contributed to the decrease.

Agus Wiyono, director of animal health at Indonesia's Agriculture Ministry, said there had been no major outbreaks of bird flu in fowl over the past three years.

Participatory Disease Searching and Response (PDSR) teams were working to monitor and report cases of bird flu in 70,000 villages, with real-time data available in 10,000 villages, Wiyono said.

Only two of the country's 33 provinces - North Maluku and Gorontalo - are free from bird flu, while West Kalimantan will soon be declared bird-flu free, he said.

The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) reported that 134 villages under surveillance were positive for H5N1 in poultry in October 2009, and the virus was endemic on Java, Sumatra and Sulawesi islands, according to WHO.

However, Chairil Anwar Nidom, a microbiologist at Universitas Airlangga in Surabaya, the provincial capital of East Java Province, cast doubt on the effectiveness of the reporting system.

In 2007, backyard chickens were banned in the capital Jakarta and authorities announced plans to relocate poultry farms and slaughterhouses from the city by April this year.

Indonesia needed to set up a new body after the National Commission on Avian Influenza and Pandemic Preparedness is disbanded in March this year, when its mandate expires, Nidom said.