Bird flu pledge after more deaths

Indonesia’s health minister promised to work harder to protect people from bird flu after two young children died of the H5N1 virus, raising the country’s toll to 22.

Siti Fadilah Supari said yesterday, after tests came back positive for a three-year-old boy and a 12-year-old girl who died last week: “We will carry out intensive rapid diagnosis of patients suspected of having the disease.”

Both were from Central Java province and apparently became ill after coming into contact with sick chickens.

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

Ninety-seven people have died, two-thirds of them in Indonesia and Vietnam.

Though health experts say bird flu 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 has been criticised for not acting fast enough to quell the spread of the disease when it first appeared in chickens three years ago.

The government has said it can do little more than vaccinate poultry stocks - arguing the internationally recommended policy of 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.

The virus has appeared in birds in 26 of the country’s 33 provinces, and jumped to humans killing 22 – all in the last nine months.

In addition to rapid diagnosis of suspected bird flu patients, Supari vowed to provide health centres 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 – enough for just over one million people.