RI not taking bird flu seriously: FAO
RI not taking bird flu seriously: FAO
Samantha Brown, Agence France-Presse/Jakarta
The head of a special UN team sent to help Indonesia fight bird flu warned that the country had not done enough to contain the virus.
The fight against the H5N1 strain must be quickly boosted because the season when it easily spreads has begun, said Peter Roeder, an animal health expert heading the UN Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) bird flu team here.
"It's not taken seriously enough by the people in this country because they're not aware of how serious the situation is," Roeder told AFP on Monday.
His statement came as the fifth human bird flu human fatality was confirmed.
"What everyone has to realize is this is extremely urgent. The reason is we're in November, which is the start of the epidemic season for avian and human influenza," he told AFP.
"This could provide the conditions for the emergence of a pandemic strain, so reducing any risk is very much an emergency issue, which needs to be done quickly."
Indonesia has reported nine human infections of the highly pathogenic strain since July. The virus has killed 63 people in Southeast Asia since 2003.
Scientists warn that continued contact between infected birds and humans might eventually result in the virus mutating into a form that could be easily passed on by humans, sparking a pandemic that would kill millions.
The Rome-based FAO has already expressed concern at a lack of awareness in Indonesia's suburban and rural communities about the threat posed by the virus.
Roeder said the FAO had devised an action plan in the past few weeks and was now setting up four disease control centers on Java island and establishing disease surveillance teams, which may involve several thousand people.
"What we're proposing to do is have a cascade of awareness and training, starting with our disease control centers," he said.
Directors of the centers will train trainers who will then fan out to the district level to teach locals about searching for the disease.
Those teams will work together to set up village disease search programs. If they find evidence of disease, then they will search house-to-house, he said.
If the approach works on Java -- where most of the infections have so far occurred -- it would probably be extended elsewhere, Roeder said.
Joseph Domenech, head of the FAO's veterinary service who announced the dispatch of Roeder's team late last month, said his agency is very much concerned about the presence of the virus in the small flocks of millions of backyard poultry farmers.
Indonesia's overall response to date has been "inadequate, but no one would pretend otherwise," Roeder said, noting that the government was "doing the best it can within the structures they have, but those structures need to change."