Indonesia stops announcing bird flu deaths on case-by-case basis

The Associated Press ,  Jakarta   |  Thu, 06/05/2008 5:27 PM  |  World

A 15-year-old girl died of bird flu last month, becoming Indonesia's 109th victim, but the government decided to keep the news quiet. It is part of a new policy aimed at improving the image of the nation hardest hit by the disease.

Heath Minister Siti Fadilah Supari said Thursday she will no longer announce deaths immediately after they are confirmed. But she promised to make the information available on a regular basis eventually, several cases at a time.

The deciion could aggravate the World Health Organization, which waits to update its official tally of Indonesia's bird flu deaths until after they are formally announced by the government.

The toll on its Web site stood at 108 on Thursday - accounting for nearly half the 241 recorded fatalities worldwide.

The country's latet victim, the teenager who died May 14 in the capital Jakarta, is not yet included.

"How does it help us to announce these deaths?" asked Supari, who has grown accustomed to controversy since taking over as health minister four years ago.

Indonesia stopped sharing bird flu samples with WHO in January 2007 after learning that some coveted data about the virus was being kept in a private database at a U.S. government laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico, and made accessible to only a handful of researchers.

She worried that pharmaceutical companies would use her country's viruses to make vaccines that re ultimately unaffordable for developing countries. She has called for the
creation of a global stockpile of lifesaving drugs, price tiering or other multinational benefit-sharing programs.

So far, the virus remains hard for people to catch. But scientists fear it could mutate to a form that spreads moreeasily between humans, possibly sparking a pandemic that could kill millions worldwide.

At present, all of Indonesia's virus samples are kept at a Health Ministry laboratory. DNA sequencing - used for risk assessment, diagnosis and to signal possible mutations - is carried out by scientists at the nearby Eijkman Institute.

"We have the capability to do this ourselves," Supari said.

Until recently, the government announced bird flu deaths by e-mail and provided an almost 24-hour information center for confirmations. It gradually abandoned that practice several months ago, often burying news of deaths on the ministry's Website.

Supari wants the news now to focus on improvements made by the government in fighting the H5N1 virus.

She says 18 people have been infected in the first six months of 2008, down from 27 during the same period in 2007 and 35 in 2006 - something she attributed to improved surveillance and public awareness.

But the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization issued a critical statement in March, saying Indonesia's efforts to control the disease in poultry are failing. The H5N1 virus is
entrenched in 31 of the country's 33 provinces and will continue to kill humans until it can be controlled in birds, it said.(**)

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