Govt has no plans for mass cull of poultry

The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

The government on Monday said it has taken the standard procedure of quarantining farms known to be affected by bird flu but has no plans to cull poultry suspected of being infected with the virus, citing inadequate funds and fears that the move would be ineffective.

Both measures are standard procedures to prevent the virus, according to the World Health Organization.

Minister of Agriculture Bungaran Saragih said, "We will not imitate neighboring countries, which have destroyed their poultry flocks for economic reasons."

Destroying poultry would be ineffective, Saragih said as quoted by Antara, "given that the virus is so widespread that culling would certainly reduce the poultry population drastically."

If bird flu became increasingly widespread, only then would the government consider destroying all affected chickens, he said, without clarifying just how widespread the virus would have to become before a decision to cull was taken.

The WHO states that "the quarantining of infected farms and destruction of infected or potentially exposed flocks are standard control measures aimed at preventing spread to other farms and eventual establishment of the virus in a country's poultry population."

Coordinating Minister for People's Welfare Jusuf Kalla said on Monday that all farmers with sick chickens should stay on their farms until health and agriculture officials came to check the site and determine the extent of the problem.

His office was working with the Ministries of Health and Agriculture in a bid to prevent the virus from spreading to more chickens and also to humans. Jusuf said that the government would have a new plan in place to contain the disease by the end of this week.

"We have not tried to cover up the disease. The problem is, we were not familiar with the term bird flu which people have been using," the senior minister contended, adding that the government had earlier announced "an epidemic" among chickens.

On Saturday, a chicken-munching Saragih said on television that the country was free of the disease, and would continue to be so as poultry imports from countries affected by bird flu had been banned. However, in a dramatic about-turn, his officials admitted on Sunday that the virus had caused the deaths of some 40 percent of the 4.7 million chickens that had died of disease since last August. The admission came, however, only after the East Java chapter of the Indonesian Association of Veterinarians confirmed that bird flu had killed millions of chickens in the province.

Meanwhile on Monday, the Ministries of Health and Agriculture sent four teams to four East Java regencies to check out reports that a farmer had been infected by the virus.

East Java government data also revealed that the disease has affected farms in Bali, Central and West Java, Yogyakarta, Banten, South Kalimantan, East Kalimantan, and Lampung provinces.

The Ministry of Health is planning blood tests for poultry farm workers in the areas hardest hit by the outbreak.

Director General of Communicable Diseases Umar Fahmi said in Surabaya that the tests would be performed mainly on workers with influenza-like symptoms.

The tests would be conducted in Bali, Riau, East Java, West Java, Central Java and Greater Jakarta, where the deaths of millions of chickens have been reported since last year.

The government will also prepare hospital space for the possible spread of the disease to humans.

Gindo M. Simanjuntak, an epidemiologist with the National Institute for Health Research and Development, said the government had put the Suliyanti Saroso Hospital for Infectious Diseases in Sunter, North Jakarta, on alert, as well as many other hospitals near poultry farms.

Meanwhile, by Monday the need for a concerted public information campaign had become even more glaring, with both breeders and consumers starting to take their own, possibly harmful, measures to avoid the disease.

In Mojokerto, East Java, a farmer said he had sold thousands of his chickens on the market as 170 had been dying each day due to "a mysterious disease" since December. Chickens suspected of being infected should be slaughtered and their carcasses burned, a researcher of the Bogor Institute of Agriculture had earlier said.

In Central Jakarta, consumers seeking food safety assurance visited a slaughter house where sellers killed the poultry for them. A seller said he was convinced the animals were safe for consumption "because they come from Solo, not Bali" where thousands of chickens have died from symptoms similar to those of bird flu. The WHO says direct marketing of live poultry must be discouraged given that the virus of a killed chicken can infect healthy ones.