Poultry breeders to get bird flu vaccines
Suherdjoko, The Jakarta Post, Semarang
Over 23 million doses of bird flu vaccine have been prepared to prevent the disease from spreading like wildfire in Central Java, an official said on Tuesday.
According to the head of the Central Java animal husbandry office, Sugiyono Pranata, the bird flu, or avian influenza, had already spread to poultry farms in Boyolali, Karanganyar, Sragen and Tegal, killing hundreds of thousands of quails, chickens and ducks in those regencies.
"The result of Veterinary Diseases Research Bureau lab test in Wates, Yogyakarta shows the cases in Boyolali and Tegal are indeed bird flu," Sugiyono said.
The vaccine, he added, would be provided for small-scale poultry farmers while large-scale farms would be asked to conduct their own vaccinations.
The farmers, he said, should also take strict biosecurity measures to prevent a further spread of the disease, including regular spraying of disinfectants.
The bird flu cases in Boyolali, Sugiyono claimed, occurred because the quails were not vaccinated. In that regency, bird flu has killed approximately 80,000 quails.
The poultry farmers' demand for the government to compensate them Rp 3,000 for each quail had not yet been discussed, he said.
"In the previous bird flu case, compensatory funds were only given to farmers who lost more than 5,000 chickens. But we still haven't discussed compensation for the affected farmers this year," he said.
Central Java was also the worst hit area when the bird flu outbreak swept the country between August 2003 and July 2004, affecting 27 out of the province's 35 regencies and killing 8.1 million fowl.
During that period, an estimated 16.2 million died out of the nearly 180 million poultry population in the 16 affected provinces.
Sugiyono said that destroying all poultry products would be hard to do in Indonesia.
"It would just be far too expensive so we'll do it selectively. We'll only destroy fowl in affected farms, either by burning or burying them," he said.