Bird flu 'could cost a million jobs'

Indonesia warned today that it could lose a million jobs because of an outbreak of bird flu.

China, which has been stung by criticism of its slow response to SARS last year, ordered its officials to act quickly and honestly in telling people about the outbreak of the disease.

In neighbouring Taiwan, the government instructed schools to send home any students with fevers as Asian countries scrambled to fend off a human outbreak of the disease.

But as nations culled tens of millions of chickens, the World Health Organisation warned that the disease could infect workers killing the birds unless they use masks, gloves and other protection – which many are not.

Indonesia, which has for days insisted a large-scale slaughter was not necessary, has reversed that decision and ordered a mandatory mass cull of chickens in infected areas.

Sofyan Sudrajad, director general of the Agriculture Ministry’s animal husbandry department, said the country could suffer as much as 7.7 trillion rupiah (€738m) in losses from the outbreak, and it could leave a total of 1.25 million people jobless.

A senior official in Vietnam – where authorities have reported eight deaths from the illness – said a nationwide cull of all poultry may be needed to curb the disease’s spread.

“We all know that it would be safer and we can eliminate the sources of the disease if a mass cull is carried out,” Bui Quang Anh, director of the Veterinary Department at the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, told Thanh Nien (Young People) newspaper.

But television and newspaper images from across Asia of barehanded people, without goggles or masks, flinging chicken carcasses into mass graves or stuffing live ones into sacks have set off alarm bells within the UN health agency.

“They are trying to eliminate the animal reservoir, which is what we want, but if they are exposing themselves to the virus while they’re doing that it might defeat the purpose,” said Maria Cheng, a spokeswoman for WHO’s infectious diseases unit.

“We see people with bare hands, their eyes, their nose and their mouth uncovered, where they are possibly breathing in virus,” Cheng said, adding that the unsafe practices were “going on pretty much everywhere.”

Experts recommend that cullers wear masks, goggles, gloves and other protective clothing.

Experts fear that the next global flu pandemic could be triggered by someone catching the bird flu sweeping Asian poultry farms while infected with a standard human variety of flu. The danger is that the two viruses could swap genes to produce a hybrid with the deadliness of the bird variety and the contagiousness of the human type.

In addition to the eight deaths in Vietnam, the only other known bird flu deaths have been in Thailand where two have died.