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2 Dithering at bird flu's ground
zero By Bill Guerin
JAKARTA - As new outbreaks of avian
influenza start to pop up across Asia, all eyes
are on the evolving situation in Indonesia, where
the virus over the weekend took its 64th human
life, more than anywhere else in the world.
While there are no indications that the
H5N1 virus has or necessarily ever will mutate
into a form that would allow for human-to-human
transmission - which health experts have gloomily
predicted could lead to a disastrous global
pandemic - concerns are rising nonetheless that
erratic government
responses to containing the
disease as witnessed in Indonesia may raise the
risk of a doomsday scenario by keeping the
virulent virus alive, mutating, and spreading
among infected birds.
That puts Indonesia
at the fowl-borne disease's ground zero. Compared
with other countries hit by bird flu, including
Thailand, Vietnam and even China, Indonesia's
efforts to check the disease's spread have been
patchy at best. For instance, when regional health
authorities gathered in Bangkok in 2004 to discuss
a coordinated regional response, Indonesia was the
only country in attendance at the meeting that
said it could not support an aggressive culling
policy for socio-economic reasons.
Two and
a half years later, Indonesia's bird-flu problem
has evolved into the region's worst with no clear
plan to change direction. Jakarta officially only
offers poultry farmers half the going market rate
for H5N1-positive fowl killed as part of
government culls, providing a strong disincentive
for grassroots farmers to report infections in
their flocks. Worse, there have been widespread
reports that many Indonesian farmers have not
received the compensation promised by the central
government from provincial authorities.
More recently, Indonesia's Public Health
Ministry raised global eyebrows when it decided in
December against sharing strains of its particular
H5N1 virus with the World Health Organization and
instead entered a cooperative memorandum of
understanding with global drug giant Baxter
International toward the development of a possible
vaccine. Health experts fear that if other
regional countries follow suit and cut the WHO out
of the loop, it could fragment its ability to
coordinate a coherent global response in the case
of a human pandemic.
Nonetheless, there is
no consensus among health experts that even if a
vaccine specific to Indonesia were developed, it
would serve as the silver bullet to avoid a global
pandemic. And whatever the merits of Jakarta's
argument on intellectual-property rights, many
believe the government's defiance toward the world
health body sends the wrong signal at a time when
the fatal disease's spread could soon reach a
crucial tipping point.
Poor governance is
hindering Indonesia's response. Successive
administrations have made compensation promises to
Indonesian communities hit by natural disasters -
ranging from the disastrous 2004 tsunami, to
sporadic earthquakes and volcano eruptions, to the
sort of flooding that recently deluged Jakarta and
left more than 350,000 people homeless - only to
be left high and dry or drastically shortchanged
by local-level officials who control the
rescue-relief purse strings.
That poor
record has reportedly made poultry farmers,
fearful that they will not be fairly compensated
for agreeing to destroy their infected flocks,
reluctant to cooperate with public-health
authorities charged with locating and culling
H5N1-hit fowl. In certain provincial districts,
the army has been called out to manage culls of
infected poultry after villagers resisted and
fought with health officials seeking to destroy
their flocks.
Moreover, the government's
belated public-awareness campaigns about the
disease's dangers, disseminated over national and
local media, have so far wholly failed to change
risky behavior related to segregating poultry from
humans. Indonesians currently maintain an
estimated 350 million roving free-range chickens
in close proximity to their households.
Disastrous responses Jakarta's
ham-fisted handling of a series of recent natural
disasters - unlike its highly praised emergency
response to the 2004 tsunami - has not inspired
much international confidence in the government's
ability to manage its spreading influenza problem.
Some cynical observers even worry that Jakarta may
be purposely dallying in hopes of securing more
foreign donor funds to help contain the disease's
spread.
Entrenched foreign concerns about
Indonesia's institutional integrity and rampant
bureaucratic graft have so far meant dedicated
funds have been slow to arrive. Coordinating
Minister for People's Welfare Aburizal Bakrie told
a global bird-flu conference held in Beijing in
January 2006 that without major
international
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