October 20, 2006

Indonesia to clear residential areas of poultry

Indonesia would clear residential areas of chickens and ducks as part of its fight against bird flu, said health and agricultural officials.

It would be a measure to check bird flu, said health minister Siti Fadilah Supari following a government meeting on bird flu. He said it should be done as soon as possible.

However, no timeframe has been allotted to the Indonesian plan, which might face resistance in a nation that has hundreds of millions of backyard birds, many of them in towns and cities.

The measure would be implemented systematically, said agriculture minister Anton Apriyantono. To begin with, they would demand poultry to be kept in cages in urban areas, he said. If chickens were found walking free, officials had the right to seize, he added.

The H5N1 virus killed about 151 people worldwide since ravaging poultry stocks across Asia in 2003, with Indonesia accounting for more than a third of the human deaths, at 55.

Most of those killed had been infected by domestic fowl, but WHO feared the virus could mutate into a form that easily spreads among humans, sparking a pandemic with the potential to kill millions.

The country attracted international criticism for not doing enough to stamp out the virus in its poultry stocks, and was told in August to organise its expenditure before receiving more foreign help.

Significant progress was made in this direction, with the government working hard to warn citizens of the dangers posed by the virus, said David Nabarro, the UN coordinator for avian and pandemic influenza.

He also said that, while much work still needed to be done, the government had increased vaccinations, surveillance and culling of infected birds.

According to the National Bird Flu Commission, number of provinces where the virus was endemic had been reduced from 30 to 16 over the past six months but that the number of deaths was still expected to rise.

The government was willing to spend an additional IDR100 billion (US$11 million) to more than double the number of hospitals offering bird flu treatment facilities to 100 nationwide, informed Aburizal Bakrie, welfare minister and commission chairman.