Indonesia dismisses human transmission on bird flu

JAKARTA, Sept. 3 (Xinhua) -- Indonesia confirmed that there has been no human-to-human transmission of avian influenza virus in the country, Health Minister Siti Fadilah Syupari said here Monday.
The minister told a press conference that thousands people had been killed should the transmission occurred already in Indonesia.
" There is no human-to-human transmission in Indonesia," she said.
"There has been no virologist report, and it is still zero epidemiologist," said Fadilah at a office here.


She said that the conclusion of the experts from the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, Washington last week could not be used to say that human-to-human transmission had already happened in Indonesia, as the expert only make their calculation mathematically.
The expert found a statistical confirmation that H5N1 virus spread from human-to-human between a small number of people within a family in North Sumatra, Indonesia, where eight people died in April last year.
"That is only a statistical test," said the minister.
In North Sumatra, the cluster contained a chain of infection that involved a ten-year-old boy who probably caught the virus from his 37-year-old aunt, who had been exposed to dead poultry and chicken feces.
The minister said that Indonesian authorities already declared the cluster in North Sumatra as limited human-to-human.
"For example, the father, who has two children, he died. Why was the mother not infected by her child, why only the father was infected?. This still become a big question until now," said Fadilah.
Experts fear that the highly pathogenic H5N1 virus could mutate in a certain level that can make them transmittable among humans that can cause a pandemic where million people can be killed.
The viruses have killed globally 195 out of 322 infected people, most of them in Indonesia with 84 fatalities and 105 cases.
It is rare that the virus was transmitted by human, most of them are passed by birds.
Cluster was rarely happen. Experts worry of the possibility that the H5N1 virus is transmitted by human.
As the number of victims of the virus keeps slowly rising in the country, the health authorities have decided to use the country's own anti-bird flu vaccine after September to stop the virus spread on human, despite the World Health Organization suggestion to stock pile the vaccines.
Huge territory, traditional way of rising chickens on back yardand lack of obedience of provincial administration in implementing the Jakarta decision to stop the virus spread, are among the obstacles in fighting the bird flu in the country.
Posted from www.chinaview.cn 2007-09-03 19:37:16