Indonesia says has experimental human bird flu vaccine

JAKARTA, Feb 1 (Reuters) Indonesia has developed a bird flu vaccine for humans but it is still at an early experimental stage, the head of the country's national committee on avian influenza said today.

Many experts fear the H5N1 bird flu virus could eventually mutate into a form that would spread easily among humans and cause a pandemic that could possibly kill millions.

In its current form, where it is spread mainly by contact with fowl, it has killed 63 Indonesians, the most fatalities of any country in the world. Six of the deaths came in January.

''We have developed an inter-pandemic bird flu vaccine for humans using the H5N1 virus Indonesia strain, but it's still at the experimental level in the lab,'' bird flu commission chief Bayu Krisnamurthi told Reuters on Friday.

''It is not yet for commercial production. It still has a long way to go,'' he said, declining to elaborate.

Indonesia Planning Minister Paskah Suzetta had said yesterday that Indonesia would declare bird flu a national disaster following a fresh flare-up in the country to guarantee financial support from a special budget fund.

However, Krisnamurthi said today that Indonesia was already approaching the virus with the utmost seriousness.

''The highest level for bird flu as an epidemic emergency has been declared for poultry since January 2004 and as for humans in September 2005. There is no level above that,'' he told reporters on the sidelines of a parliamentary hearing.

The H5N1 virus is endemic in poultry in many provinces in the Indonesian archipelago of 17,000 islands, which stretch across an area as wide as the continental United States.

Agriculture Minister Anton Apriyantono said in a speech to parliament today that the number of deaths in Indonesian poultry from bird flu in 2006 was around the same as in the previous year.

Bird flu deaths among Indonesian fowl in both years were around 1.06 million, he said.

The virus has killed at least 164 people worldwide since 2003, according to the World Health Organisation. At least 200 million birds, the majority of them chickens and ducks, have died or been culled, costing farmers and the poultry industry billions of dollars across dozens of countries.

REUTERS AKJ KP1846