Indonesia's health minister said she would no longer announce human deaths from bird flu immediately, but promised to make the information available on a regular basis eventually, probably several cases at a time.
Siti Fadilah Supari revealed the policy shift Thursday after acknowledging a 15-year-old girl from the capital, Jakarta, died quietly of bird flu on May 14, becoming the 109th victim in the nation hardest hit by the disease.
Indonesia's decision could aggravate the World Health Organization, which waits to update its official tally of bird flu deaths until after they are formally announced by the government. The toll on its Web site stood at 108 on Thursday _ accounting for nearly half the 241 recorded fatalities worldwide.
"How does it help us to announce these deaths?" asked Supari, adding that it in her opinion it only hurts her country's reputation.
The health minister has grown accustomed to controversy since assuming her post four years ago.
She stopped sharing bird flu samples with WHO in January 2007 after learning that some coveted data about the virus was being kept in a private database at a U.S. government laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico, and made accessible to only a handful of researchers.
Experts said she was making it impossible to determine if the virus was mutating to a more dangerous form.
But Supari was worried pharmaceutical companies would use Indonesia's viruses to make vaccines that were ultimately unaffordable for developing countries. She called for the creation of a global stockpile of lifesaving drugs, price tiering or other multinational benefit-sharing programs.
So far, the virus remains hard for people to catch. But scientists fear it could morph to a form that spreads more easily between humans, possibly sparking a pandemic that could kill millions worldwide.
At present, all of Indonesia's virus samples are kept at a Health Ministry laboratory. DNA sequencing _ used for risk assessment, diagnosis and to signal possible mutations _ is carried out by scientists at the nearby Eijkman Institute.
"We have the capability to do this ourselves," Supari said.
Until recently, the government announced bird flu deaths by e-mail and provided an almost 24-hour information center for confirmations. It gradually abandoned that practice several months ago, often burying news of deaths on the ministry's Web site.
Supari wants the news now to focus on improvements made by the government in fighting the H5N1 virus.
She says 18 people have been infected in the first six months of 2008, down from 27 during the same period in 2007 and 35 in 2006 _ something she attributed to improved surveillance and public awareness.
But the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization issued a critical statement in March, saying Indonesia's efforts to control the disease in poultry are failing. The H5N1 virus is entrenched in 31 of the country's 33 provinces and will continue to kill humans until it can be controlled in birds, it said.
___
Associated Press reporter Zakki Hakim contributed to this report.
No comments:
Post a Comment