Indonesia's Bird-Flu Death Toll Up to 22

Associated Press | March 10, 2006
By ZAKKI HAKIM

JAKARTA, Indonesia (AP) -- Indonesia, which has come under fire for its attempts to prevent the spread of bird flu, said Friday that two children had died of the disease, bringing the country's death toll to 22.

Taiwan, meanwhile, protested a World Health Organization map that lumped the island with its rival, China, officially identifying it as a place that has suffered human infections of the deadly H5N1 strain of the virus.

"Taiwan is not an area affected by bird flu and is certainly not part of the People's Republic of China," Foreign Minister James Huang told lawmakers. China announced its 10th fatality from the disease on Wednesday.

Taiwan and China split amid civil war in 1949. China claims sovereignty over the self-ruled island, but concedes it does not administer it.

In Geneva, WHO spokesman Gregory Hartl defended the move.

"As you know WHO is a member of the United Nations, and the United Nations policy is that there is one China, and Taiwan is a province of China, therefore the entire country has the same color," Hartl said.

The death toll from H5N1 rose to 22 in Indonesia after WHO-approved laboratories confirmed that a 3-year-old boy and a 12-year-old girl died in Central Java province from the virus. Both victims appeared to have come into contact with infected birds.

The girl died March 1 in Solo, Health Minister Siti Fadilah Supari said after receiving confirmation of the infection from a laboratory in Hong Kong.

The toddler died Feb. 28 in the town of Semarang, said Hariadi Wibisono, a senior Indonesian Health Ministry official. A local laboratory had earlier confirmed the cause of death, but the WHO sent samples to Atlanta for confirmation "and they were positive," Wibisono said.

An investigation was being carried out to find out how the children became infected.

In Sri Lanka, poultry farmers launched a campaign Friday to encourage people to eat chicken, sales of which have fallen 20 percent since February when bird flu forced the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of birds in neighboring India.

There have been no cases of bird flu reported in Sri Lanka, which banned live bird imports nine months ago, according to D.D. Wanasinghe, head of the Poultry Farmers Association.

H5N1 has killed or forced the slaughter of more than 140 million chickens and ducks across Asia since 2003, and has recently spread to Europe, Africa and the Middle East.

At least 97 people have died from the disease worldwide, two-thirds of them in Indonesia and Vietnam, according to WHO figures. The latest Indonesian case, if confirmed, would bring the number to 98.

Although health experts say the virus remains difficult for humans to catch, they fear it could mutate and set off a flu pandemic that could kill millions of people worldwide.

Indonesia's Health and Agriculture Ministries particularly have been criticized for not acting fast enough to quell the spread of the disease when it first appeared in 2003, allowing it to spread to 26 of the country's 33 provinces. Its 22 fatalities all have occurred in the past nine months.

The government has said it can afford to do little more than vaccinate poultry stocks - slaughtering all chickens and ducks in affected areas would be too costly.

It occasionally carries out selective slaughters, but those efforts are seen largely as made-for-television public relations campaigns.

Indonesia promised Friday to do more to protect humans.

"We will carry out intensive rapid diagnosis of patients suspected of having the disease," Supari told reporters.

She also vowed to provide health centers across the sprawling archipelago with more Tamiflu - one of the few drugs believed effective in treating bird flu. The government says it wants to stockpile 12 million tablets by end 2005 - enough for just over 1 million people.

Last modified March 10, 2006