Indonesia will declare bird flu a national disaster, giving the government access to special funds to combat the disease that has killed 63 people, the planning minister said. “It has become an epidemic,” Paskah Suzetta said Wednesday in Jakarta, where authorities were preparing for the compulsory slaughter of thousands of backyard chickens as part of high-profile efforts to fight the H5N1 bird flu virus.
Indonesia, which has tallied more than one-third of the world's human deaths from H5N1, has come under criticism for failing to crack down on bird flu when it first appeared in poultry stocks nearly four years ago. The virus is now endemic in chickens almost all over the country and despite optimism late last year that it may have been contained, it killed six people in the last month. Many of the 63 people who have died lived near the teeming capital, home also to more than 100,000 backyard chickens, ducks, doves and song birds.
Authorities gave residents weeks to voluntarily destroy their birds and were preparing to go door-to-door in some neighbourhoods Thursday to make sure the order had been carried out, Jakarta Governor Sutiyoso said. |