Rendi Akhmad Witular, Jakarta – Vice President Jusuf Kalla has blamed the failure to curb bird flu deaths on regional administrations, which he said had deliberately defied orders from the central government to cull whole populations of infected poultry.
That defiance, he added, allowed the lethal H5N1 avian influenza virus to spread to 27 of the country's 33 provinces. Recently Indonesia's human death toll from the disease reached 43, the highest in the world.
"There must be sterner measures. Regional administrations should realize this. If the central government says a mass cull is needed, that means they have to do it," Kalla said after performing Friday prayers.
He said poultry owners had often resisted culling and sought protection from their regents, who backed them in their protests against the government's measures.
This was the case in the North Sumatra regency of Karo, Kalla said, where seven relatives died from bird flu in the largest family cluster of cases reported so far.
Local governments have argued a mass cull of infected poultry was impossible due to the lack of compensation for the birds' owners. Instead they have opted to promote public awareness to attempt to curb the spread of the killer virus and reduce human casualties.
"The cooperation from local governments is crucial in stamping out infections in birds. We will pay for mass culls. Don't join the people's protests against us. We sometimes need an authoritarian style of governance for such purposes," said Kalla.
Experts fear the virus could mutate into a form that can pass from human to human. That could spark a pandemic capable of killing millions of people.
The World Health Organization-sanctioned laboratory in Hong Kong confirmed that a 44-year-old Indonesian man who died last week was infected with the virus.
That confirmation brought the country's total deaths to 43 out of 56 verified patients, surpassing Vietnam's 42 of 93, according to figures from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta, Georgia.
However, the WHO counts only 42 deaths of 54 patients, since one death and one infection have been confirmed only by the CDC.
The first human casualties in Indonesia were reported in mid-2005, after the government issued an announcement in January that the virus was circulating throughout the country.
The virus is endemic among billions of chickens across the archipelago.
The government's public campaign about the dangers of the virus appears to have failed to raise alertness toward H5N1 among the more than 220 million Indonesian citizens spread across more than 17,000 islands.