Mysterious bird flu

Patterns in bird flu cases remain mystery

Tb. Arie Rukmantara, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

Although his hometown has never seen bird flu, I Putu Widya is dismayed by the fact that Indonesia is one more death away from being on a par with Vietnam as countries with the world's most H5N1 fatalities.

What worries Putu is that he feels nobody has explained why the deadly virus is difficult to contain and why it kills people selectively.

"I'm so confused -- why some people die instantly due to bird flu and why others don't. That worries me," said the 27-year-old employee of a guest house in Ubud, Bali.

Bali is among four provinces that still have not seen human fatalities. The highly pathogenic virus had infected over 16 million chickens in 29 provinces.

Health Ministry spokeswoman Lili Sulistyowati said the government and scientists were still trying to figure out the mystery over the bird flu spread.

"We need thorough scientific research to explain why some people have a certain immunity against the virus and why others don't," she told The Jakarta Post.

The World Health Organization has confirmed that the H5N1 virus has mutated in one of the seven family clusters in Indonesia, but did not evolve into a more transmissible form.

However, what is not clear is why the virus infected only blood relatives but not spouses.

Critics have said research to uncover the mystery was too slow, leaving the public worried over the fact that the country continued to count more bird flu deaths.

Of the 54 confirmed human cases, Indonesia has seen 41 deaths of H5N1 since the first human casualty was recorded last year. It trails behind Vietnam with 42 deaths out of 93 confirmed cases. However, Vietnam has not recorded any deaths since a massive cull of chickens and birds last year.

The Indonesian government said it could not afford to compensate farmers for millions of infected chicken across the nation, saying it could only allot Rp 300 million this year, meaning that it could only pay for 30,000 culled fowl.

The 2005 State of the Environment report confirmed the government slow's response to the H5N1 outbreak. It said the H5N1 outbreak among poultry had actually taken place in 2003, but the Agriculture Ministry only announced it on Jan. 25 last year.

A senior Agriculture Ministry official told the Post that the late announcement was due to prolonged debate between animal health experts in determining the virus genotype, in which some experts insisted that it was not H5N1 but Newcastle disease.

An official with the National Commission on Bird Flu said none of the research was able to show exactly how to stop the virus from spreading.

But the official, who asked not to be named, acknowledged that research carried out by an animal health expert with Airlangga University in Surabaya, Chairul A. Nidom, exposed credible information.

"Nidom had said that there were limited human-to-human transmissions, although many experts were against him at the time, but now some have admitted that he might be correct," he said.

Nidom's research in Japan last year showed that some of the viruses had a form that made human genes receptive to it, thus making them easy to transmit.