Asia - Indonesia Plans Mass Poultry Culling to Halt Bird Flu
Published:September 20, 2005
Source :Bloomberg
Indonesia will slaughter poultry and pigs in areas most infected by bird flu, 10 days after a fourth person died from the disease, a minister said today.
The government also plans to draft a law that will allow it to punish farmers who refuse to kill their poultry, Agriculture Minister Anton Apriantono told reporters after a meeting with President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono to discuss ways to halt the spread of the avian influenza virus.
Indonesia confirmed its first bird-flu deaths on July 20, after a man and his two daughters died from the H5N1 virus, a deadly strain of the avian influenza virus. The fourth human fatality, a 37-year-old woman, was confirmed to have been killed by bird flu on Sept. 10, Indonesian Health Minister Siti Fadilah Supari said on Sept. 16.
Avian influenza has infected more than 100 people in Asia and killed about half of them since 2004, three health agencies, including the World Health Organization, said last month.
"If the number of infected chickens reaches 20 percent of the total, all the chickens in that farm will be culled,'' Apriantono said. Indonesia hasn't carried out a mass culling. In July, it canceled a plan to mass cull infected animals due to resistance from farmers and a lack of funds.
For every animal culled, farmers should be compensated with money worth the price of a baby animal plus a three-month stock of animal feed, Apriantono said.
More than 140 million chickens have been slaughtered in Asia because of concern that H5N1 virus may mutate into a form easily transmissible between humans.
As humans are unlikely to have immunity to a mutated strain of H5N1, the World Health Organization is concerned it may trigger an influenza pandemic like the one that led to more than 40 million deaths worldwide in 1918. All cases of human infection in Asia are believed by health officials to have come from animals.
More than 10 million poultry have died of avian influenza in Indonesia since August 2003, Apriantono said on Sept. 19.
Bird flu was found in poultry in 22 of Indonesia's 33 provinces since 2003 and further outbreaks are imminent, I. Nyoman Kandun, director general of disease control and environmental sanitation at the health ministry, said on Sept. 16.
