UN praises RI's $10m effort to combat bird flu
UN praises RI's $10m effort to combat bird flu
Associated Press, Jakarta
Indonesia has allocated US$10 million to finance a culling and vaccination campaign that should effectively contain its latest outbreak of the deadly bird flu virus, a U.N. agency said Friday.
Bird flu resurfaced last week on Indonesia's heavily populated Java island, killing 350 chickens. Tests showed the birds had the lethal H5N1 strain of the virus, which has killed 31 people this year in Thailand and Vietnam.
Authorities have urged farmers to vaccinate their flocks, and are also planning to step up surveillance of affected areas, contain live birds and animal waste, and launch a public education campaign, said the U.N.'s Food and Agriculture Organization, or FAO.
Carolyn Benigno, an FAO official who visited Indonesia earlier this week, said Indonesian authorities will also conduct more culls and vaccinations under a $10 million program.
"The plan is very comprehensive and it covers all the issues of avian flu," Benigno said told The Associated Press by telephone from Bangkok.
"They are in the control of the situation," she added. "They realize they have to move quickly."
During an earlier outbreak in February, Jakarta came under heavy criticism for failing to alert the public of the threat of bird flu, and for being slow to respond with measures aimed at containing it.
The government eventually ordered a mass cull during that outbreak, but it isn't known how many birds were slaughtered or how many died from the disease. No people in Indonesia are reported to have contracted the virus.
A second outbreak in July prompted officials to launch a massive campaign to vaccinate chickens.
Officials from Indonesia's Agriculture Ministry said the recent string of cases was isolated and that the overall number of bird flu cases was decreasing. The latest outbreak coincided with a second round of vaccinations across the country.
The disease spread through a wide swath of Asia in the first few months of this year, killing or prompting the cull of more than 100 million chickens and other farm birds.
Another wave of outbreaks since July has struck countries including Thailand, Vietnam, China, Malaysia and Indonesia.