Indonesia culls chickens, to get tough on bird flu

JAKARTA - Workers in Indonesia culled 1600 chickens today in a village where the H5N1 bird flu virus killed a 15-year-old boy this week, and the government said owners who refused to surrender their poultry could be jailed.

Chickens at the boy's home and around the village where he lived in the Tasikmalaya region of west Java died a few days before he fell ill. The boy died on May 30, a day after he was admitted to hospital.

"Tasikmalaya conducted mass culling today," said Bayu Krisnamurthi of a taskforce to fight the H5N1.

Workers killed the chickens in the village and burnt them before burying them. The chickens were within a 200-metre radius of the boy's home.

"This operation is to remove the source of infection," said Nana Adnan, a veterinarian who oversaw the culling.

The culling came as Health Minister Siti Fadillah Supari said that the government would have no qualms about invoking the Epidemic Law of 1984 if citizens failed to co-operate.

"The law will be used for example when people refuse to cull their chickens without a clear reason and when they have clearly put the community in danger," Supari told reporters in Jakarta.

"The law will also be used to put people in quarantine during outbreaks. Those who refuse it can be sent to jail for a year." Indonesia's government has been roundly criticised for what is perceived as its lack of resolve in stamping out the H5N1 virus, which experts fear could spark a pandemic if it mutates to become easily transmissible among people.

Unlike neighbouring Thailand and Vietnam, which have conducted mass culls to get rid of sources of infection, Indonesia has only carried out some selective culling and only in places where there are known outbreaks of H5N1.

The virus is now endemic in nearly all of Indonesia's 33 provinces. It has infected 49 Indonesians and killed 36 of them since the start of 2005.

The medical community was alarmed last month when the virus killed as many as seven members in a single family in Karo regency in north Sumatra. The WHO has since said that limited human-to-human transmission may have occurred.

But it assured that genetic analyses of the virus did not show all of the mutations or traits that are known to date which would allow the virus to pass easily among people.

Krisnamurthi said mass culling will be done in Karo.

"Mass culling will be conducted in Karo by local government after a decree by the minister. The culling will be done five to 10 days after the instruction from the minister," he said.

"I hope tomorrow, the instruction will be released."

The first person to die in the Sumatran cluster was a 37-year-old vegetable farmer and WHO officials said she could have been infected by two of her chickens, which died shortly before she fell sick, or by the fertilisers she used.

"She used chicken faeces for fertiliser and they can be infected with H5N1," said Steven Bjorge, a WHO epidemiologist.

She also sold her vegetables in a market where there were poultry and might have been infected there.

"We have three possible sources for her to become infected but we don't have any conclusive evidence," Bjorge said.

- REUTERS