'The World Should Help Indonesia'

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'The World Should Help Indonesia'
http://www.zaman.com/?bl=hotnews&alt=&trh=20060622&hn=34202

By Anadolu News Agency (aa), Jakarta
Published: Thursday, June 22, 2006
zaman.com

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has announced that the international community should support Indonesia in its fight against the bird flu.


Emphasizing that while Indonesia has been besieged by natural disasters, the bird flu has been spreading throughout the country, FAO expert Peter Roeder said ?The international community must move to invest to control the disease in Indonesia.?


Roeder, emphasizing that slow foreign financing has been a cause for disappointment, referred to the last year?s donors? conference held in the Chinese capital Beijing when he asked ?Where is the money pledged in Beijing??


Thirty nine people have officially died from the bird flu in Indonesia, where residents have been struggling to recover from natural disasters such as earthquakes and the tsunami.


Experts term the bird flu virus, which appeared on poultry farms throughout Indonesia, as ?a time bomb.?
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Australian Government to Help Indonesia

Australian Government to Help Indonesia

BIRD FLU FUNDING PLAN FOR JAKARTA
Peter Alford, Tokyo correspondent (The Australian)
June 26, 2006

The Australian Government wants to help Indonesia set up a proper compensation scheme for poultry farmers hit by avian flu because the lack of such measures is blocking regional efforts to prevent a pandemic.

Health Minister Tony Abbott discussed the initiative with his Indonesian counterpart in Jakarta at the weekend, ahead of today's summit between John Howard and President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono.

Mr Abbott, who is in Shanghai today on a four-nation "bird-flu tour", got some bad news about the heightened risk of a pandemic during talks in Tokyo, his first stopover.

The deadly H5N1 strain had mutated, World Health Organisation regional director Shigeru Omi told him, and there were now at least two sub-types.

That was "very sobering" news, Mr Abbott said.

"The more sub-types, the more possible it is for evolution into a strain transmissible easily from human to human."

While Japanese researchers could not quantify the increased risk, "their judgment is that a pandemic is more likely now than it was".

The other critical issue in preventing a large-scale human outbreak of the disease was controlling avian flu in poultry and other bird populations.

The good news was that two hot-spot countries, Vietnam and Thailand, had introduced effective surveillance and control measures, and neither had suffered a significant outbreak among birds or any human case since November. The bad news was that Indonesia did not have effective controls.

Indonesia is the most worrying danger spot because of the rapid incidence of human infection, because the most ominous cluster was in Sumatra recently - eight infections and five deaths in one family - and because of the lack of effective surveillance for avian flu among bird populations.

"One of the problems in Indonesia is that there is not a well-developed compensation system for farmers who have bird flu in their poultry flocks," Mr Abbott said. "You can't really get an effective reporting system in countries like these unless you have an effective compensation system."

Indonesia has a tiny budget for controlling avian flu, and within that, only 30 billion rupiah ($4.36 million) is allocated to compensating farmers whose flocks are culled to control outbreaks.

For each destroyed chicken, a farmer gets R10,000, whereas the birds fetch R15,000 to R30,000 at market.

The poor compensation and shortage of overall funds means Indonesian authorities order more limited and selective poultry culls than needed to safely contain flu outbreaks.

The Indonesians have asked for foreign aid to support the compensation scheme, but so far have only received funding tied to vaccines, anti-viral drugs and medical equipment.

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,19588490-601,00.html