Indonesia's bird flu fight riddled with problems

JAKARTA, May 23 (Reuters) Indonesian laboratory chief Abdul Adjid sent one of his staff to a village in Sumatra to collect animal samples this month after several members of a family fell sick with the H5N1 bird flu virus and died.

The staffer came back with blood and nasal swab samples of a few ducks but failed with the pigs because he could not get anywhere near them.

''He was alone. He couldn't handle the pigs. People there were unhappy with the situation so they did not help,'' said Adjid of Indonesia's Veterinary Research Institute.

Those few, short sentences reflect a litany of simple, but tremendous, problems Indonesia, the world's fourth most populous country, faces in its fight against the H5N1 virus.

There's a lack of trained personnel and equipment and many Indonesians are ignorant about the disease and suspicious of government workers as well as efforts to control the virus.

Add to this a massive geographical landscape of 17,000 islands that stretch 5,000 kilometres (3,100 miles) from east to west and it makes control of any infectious disease a nightmare.

''There is substantial room for more work to be done. We are ramping up our team here to work with the Agriculture Ministry to increase personnel in the field to deal with the problem of surveillance and response to cases when they are found,'' said Larry Allen of the U N's Food and Agriculture Organisation.

Since its first known attack on Indonesian poultry in late 2003, the H5N1 virus has wreaked havoc in terms of human lives and losses to the poultry industry. At least 32 Indonesians have died of bird flu, the second highest total in any country so far.

Some experts blame the crisis partly on Jakarta's policy against killing large numbers of fowl in infected areas.

Sick chickens are the main source for human infections worldwide and experts say the best way to prevent the virus spreading is to stamp out the disease in poultry.

But the cash-strapped government says mass culling is just too expensive and too hard to carry out in many areas of the country. Widespread culling would also meet resistance in a nation where millions keep a few birds in their yards.

For millions more, fowl are essential to their livelihoods.

While Thailand and Vietnam seem to have controlled the virus, H5N1 is believed to be endemic in almost all Indonesia's 33 provinces.

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