Indonesia to extend poultry ban in bird flu fight

JAKARTA, Jan 18 (Reuters) Indonesia will extend a ban on backyard poultry in the capital to eight other provinces in an attempt to stem a new flare-up of bird flu, the health minister said today.

Jakarta's governor Yesterday told city residents their backyard fowl would be confiscated and destroyed if they failed to get rid of the birds by the end of the month.

The move follows the deaths of four people since the start of the year, taking the number of confirmed human deaths from the virus in the country to 61, the highest in the world. All four victims came from Jakarta and its surroundings.

Health Minister Siti Fadilah Supari said the ban would be extended to eight other provinces that had reported human infections of the H5N1 bird flu virus.

''There must be special zones for poultry away from residential areas,'' she told reporters, adding the measure would eventually be enforced in all the country's 33 provinces.

The home affairs ministry issued a circular urging authorities in the nine affected provinces to tighten their monitoring of poultry traffic, she added.

Chickens roam freely just a couple of minutes' walk from the capital's central business district. Elsewhere in Indonesia, it is common to see poultry workers handling dead birds, mucus dripping from beaks, with bare hands.

As fears of a resurgence of the virus grow, Vietnam ordered farmers to stop ducks from roaming in the Mekong delta where bird flu has killed thousands of ducks in past weeks.

But in Indonesia, there were doubts over whether its ban would work. Official calls for culling have met with stiff resistance in the past due to meagre compensation and difficulties enforcing rules in the provinces.

Nyoman Kandun, the health ministry's director-general for communicable disease control, said poultry owners would be paid compensation of 12,500 rupiah (1.4 dollars) for each sick bird killed.

A fully grown chicken costs about 35,000 rupiah in Jakarta.

Jakarta's governor said yesterday there would be no payment for healthy birds, although farmers could sell or consume them before February. 1, the start date for the ban in the capital.

More than a dozen people have been admitted to hospital with bird flu-like symptoms since the start of the year, although many have been discharged or tested negative.

Tests on the latest suspected case of a 45-year-old woman who died on Sunday at a hospital in Central Java province, showed she did not have the virus, Muhammad Nadirin, a doctor at the health ministry's bird flu information centre, said.

REUTERS SHB RK1645