Govt has no plans for mass cull of poultry

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.