Indonesians have mostly shrugged off the risks from bird flu despite the deaths of three members of a family this month from the virus, the first in the world’s fourth most populous country.
“In the streets of Jakarta, we still find motorists carrying dozens of chickens without protection,” an editorial in Media Indonesia newspaper said on Friday.
It said the government was failing to educate the public about the risks and appropriate precautions to take against the deadly H5N1 strain of the virus, which killed a civil servant and his two young daughters.
“I know nothing about bird flu. I just know it from TV. So far nobody has been infected here,” said beverage vendor Muani, not far from an infected pig farm in Tangerang on the outskirts of Jakarta where slaughtering is scheduled for Sunday.
At a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant nearby, the assistant manager said customers still flocked to the fast-food outlet.
“People are still eating chicken, and there is no significant fall in sales so far,” said Sigit Irawan.
The three family members died earlier this month in Tangerang, a suburb about 20 miles from the center of the Indonesian capital, a city of 10 million.
Officials have said that there was no concrete evidence of contact between the victims and poultry and that laboratory tests showed the strain was not a new mutation allowing the disease to be passed between humans.
Health experts worried
That has left health experts puzzling over the deaths.
“Could there have been person-to-person transfer? That’s the question we are trying to answer,” Sian Griffiths, director of the School of Public Health at the Chinese University in Hong Kong, told Reuters.
“If you’ve got human-to-human transfer, you want to know the route of transfer, where the infection came from in the first place ... and how do you stop any potential spread before it gets into the population and becomes an epidemic.”
Indonesia has prepared 44 hospitals across the country for the treatment and detection of bird flu.
In a sprawling archipelago dotted with small farms, where even many urban families keep chickens, pinpointing the source of the virus is proving difficult.
Avian influenza, which arrived in Asia in late 2003, has so far killed more than 50 people in the region including Vietnam, Thailand, and Cambodia. In Indonesia, the virus has spread to 21 provinces out of a total of 33 over the past two years.
Industry officials say domestic poultry consumption could fall this year by 20 percent from around 40,000 tons due to bird flu. In recent week prices have already fallen in some parts of Indonesia by up to 30 percent.
“Of course I’m worried. I will avoid eating chicken, and I hope the problem will be under control soon,” said Lilik Priadi, 28, a Jakarta bank employee.