The Australian Government wants to help Indonesia
set up a proper compensation scheme for poultry farmers hit by avian
flu because the lack of such measures is blocking regional efforts
to prevent a pandemic.
Health Minister Tony Abbott discussed the initiative
with his Indonesian counterpart in Jakarta at the weekend, ahead
of today's summit between John Howard and President Susilo Bambang
Yudhoyono.
Mr Abbott, who is in Shanghai today on a four-nation
"bird-flu tour", got some bad news about the heightened
risk of a pandemic during talks in Tokyo, his first stopover.
The deadly H5N1 strain had mutated, World Health
Organisation regional director Shigeru Omi told him, and there were
now at least two sub-types.
That was "very sobering" news, Mr Abbott
said.
"The more sub-types, the more possible it
is for evolution into a strain transmissible easily from human to
human."
While Japanese researchers could not quantify the
increased risk, "their judgment is that a pandemic is more
likely now than it was".
The other critical issue in preventing a large-scale
human outbreak of the disease was controlling avian flu in poultry
and other bird populations.
The good news was that two hot-spot countries,
Vietnam and Thailand, had introduced effective surveillance and
control measures, and neither had suffered a significant outbreak
among birds or any human case since November. The bad news was that
Indonesia did not have effective controls.
Indonesia is the most worrying danger spot because
of the rapid incidence of human infection, because the most ominous
cluster was in Sumatra recently - eight infections and five deaths
in one family - and because of the lack of effective surveillance
for avian flu among bird populations.
"One of the problems in Indonesia is that
there is not a well-developed compensation system for farmers who
have bird flu in their poultry flocks," Mr Abbott said. "You
can't really get an effective reporting system in countries like
these unless you have an effective compensation system."
