Susilo addresses WB meet on flu scare

Rendi A. Witular, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

While efforts to prevent global flu pandemic here have been deemed inadequate, President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono appealed on Sunday for nations worldwide to seriously seek prevention measures for the disease.

Susilo said on Sunday that the cross-border disease urgently required considerable aid from nations and international agencies to contain it. He urged the international community not to repeat past mistakes of not doing enough to solve global ills.

"The pandemic will be worse than the tsunami disaster, which killed hundred of thousands (of people) but stopped after a few minutes. In a pandemic, the virus will spread in minutes and will kill more people in vast areas. It will be our worst nightmare," he said.

Susilo made the remarks before some 200 delegations from 90 countries via a video conference link during the World Bank's annual conference in Helsinki, Finland.

Health experts around the world are currently on high alert for a possible mutation of the avian influenza virus, which would allow it to travel between humans. Currently, the virus can only be passed on from birds to humans if people have close contact with infected birds.

Alarm is growing about bird flu, which was first detected in China and then in Southeast Asia, after it recently crossed Asia, infecting birds in Turkey and Romania.

The world has seen six influenza pandemics in the past three centuries, with three in the last century alone; the 1918 epidemic which killed between 20 million to 50 million people, the Asian flu in the 1950s which killed five million people, and the Hong Kong flu in 1968 which killed a million people.

Susilo said the millennium development goals (MDG) project to fight poverty would be set back years if humanity was to suffer from such a pandemic because the disease would disproportionately affect poor countries.

Susilo estimated the economic costs resulting from the pandemic would be far more than the US$30 billion losses recorded during the outbreak of the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) last year in East and Southeast Asia.

"A pandemic would be a huge setback to the global community to reach the MDG goals by 2015. That is why we must all be on high alert. We must develop a contingency plan, if such a mutated deadly virus is ever formed," he said.

Susilo, however, did not elaborate on efforts made by Indonesia so far in preventing the pandemic, which is confirmed to have killed three people in a Jakarta family, with two more people confirmed sufferers.

A handful more people have tested influenza positive in preliminary tests here and are currently undergoing medical treatment, with some reports suggesting there are as many as 85 other suspected bird flu cases in the country.

Aside from declaring an "extraordinary situation" for the outbreak last September, no drastic measures have been taken by the government so far, aside from airing an advertisement advising people to voluntarily kill privately owned birds they suspect are infected.

The government has been criticized for not launching a massive cull of infected birds here because it says the operation would be too expensive.