Thursday, June 01, 2006
WHO expert accuses Indonesian authorities of bird flu incompetence
A World Health Organization expert on Monday, accused Indonesian authorities of band-aid solutions to combat bird flu. He also said that more people could die if outbreaks among poultry are not contained.
“The situation is that there is a leak in the roof, and the Ministry of Health is just mopping up the floor every day,” epidemiologist Steve Bjorge said.
Indonesia has the world’s second- highest number of confirmed human bird flu deaths after Vietnam with 36 - and the most deaths this year.
Bjorge said Indonesia had to start mass culls of infected birds and more intensive testing of fowl suspected of carrying the H5N1 bird flu virus if it wanted to stem the spreading of the virus, which he said was “pandemic in poultry.”
In Papua’s Manokwari district, he said, “they have had three outbreaks in the last nine months, and each time they’ve culled and they’ve stopped it. That to me means, even in Indonesia, it is possible to do it.”
But the sprawling country’s hugely decentralized government - spread over 17,000 islands - means that preventing the spread of the bird flu virus among birds is a very complicated task, Bjorge said, adding there is no central authority that can order culling “on a minute’s notice.”
Indonesian health officials are also fighting a lack of public awareness about the disease and its dangers, with many people failing to report to hospitals when they develop flu-like symptoms - even if relatives or neighbors are already ill with the disease.
In addition, many Indonesians continued to eat and slaughter sick chickens, or sell their feces as fertilizer.
Indonesia has been closely monitoring a case in a North Sumatra village, where seven family members all died of the bird flu virus, raising fears that it was the country’s first case of human- to-human transmission of avian flu.