Jakarta (ANTARA News) - Indonesia faces a serious problem from bird flu, which is now endemic in poultry across much of the country, the UN official heading the global fight against avian influenza said.
The vast archipelago nation is the country worst hit by the pathogenic H5N1 strain of bird flu with 63 fatalities since its first human case in July 2005.
"The problems that have been faced around bird flu, or avian influenza, are really quite serious in this country," David Nabarro, senior UN system influenza coordinator told AFP in an interview here.
"In Indonesia the highly pathogenic bird flu virus is pretty deeply entrenched, what we call endemic, in poultry in many parts of the country," he said ahead of meetings on Monday with Indonesian and UN officials.
At one point 160 out of 444 districts reported the virus in poultry.
The greater the amount of virus, the greater the risk of human infection and of the virus mutating into a form easily transmissible between humans, the British doctor said. Most victims had been in close contact with infected birds.
Upgrading livestock rearing practices in a country where many people keep chickens in their homes, improving health services and increasing public awareness of the risks will take time and commitment, he said.
"It's a five-to-ten year agenda and in Indonesia at the moment it's an agenda that needs to be given extra impetus and Komnas (the Indonesian bird flu committee) and the rest of the government are doing that right now," he said, adding there currently existed an "important window of opportunity."
A lot longer
Other Asian countries that have suffered human bird flu deaths have already taken concerted action to deal with the problem.
"In Vietnam and Thailand it was relatively easy for the prime minister to say 'we are going to make this a high national priority' and to get different parts of government ... to 'march in step' and deal with the problem," Nabarro said.
"The Indonesian political situation and government situation is quite different," he explained, pointing to the high degree of local authority.
Building a consensus for concerted action against bird flu therefore "takes a lot longer," said Nabarro who has worked in public health for three decades.
But Indonesia has recently started to tackle the problem and is undertaking mass media campaigns which Nabarro said were important in raising public awareness of the threat.
"We've seen the issue rise up and then suddenly during the last two or three weeks it's really got a new head of steam and that provides an opportunity for really moving ahead quickly," he said.
Jakarta has just introduced a ban on backyard poultry. Improved veterinary services are being rolled out district by district and officials are trying to keep the pressure on.
"Which is difficult to do in a country where people are experiencing a lot of other problems besides the threats posed by bird flu," Nabarro admitted after arriving in Jakarta where floods have left hundreds of thousands of people homeless.
Indonesia has suffered cluster cases of apparently limited human-to-human transmission of bird flu but Nabarro said it was unlikely a mutation would pass unnoticed unless it occurred in a very isolated part of the world.
"So the requirement for spotting it is that people are honest about what's happening inside their country, and it's helped greatly if the health services are working well," he said.
"Even countries that have been identified as perhaps places where information might be hushed up have been remarkably open about problems they're facing as a result of avian influenza," the doctor said.
"So I'm confident that we would have a very high chance of an expanding cluster being picked up quickly and therefore have a good chance of containing it and preventing, or at least delaying, the human pandemic."
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