Indonesia
to produce millions of tamiflu to combat bird flu
06 September, 2006
Indonesia will produce 5 million tablets of tamiflu
this year and conduct a massive vaccination of poultry to combat
avian influenza, senior officials said here Tuesday.
Two local companies, the Kimia Farma and the Indo
Farma have registered to take part in the production, said Director
General of Pharmacy Services of the Indonesian Health Ministry Richard
Panjaitan.
"The next plan is to obtain (tamiflu) from
domestic production, " he told Xinhua.
"Five million capsules of tamiflu will be
produced before December this year," said Panjaitan.
However, he said that the materials for the capsules
would still be imported from other countries.
Earlier, Indonesia has imported 5 million tamiflu
from India and 2 million from Switzerland, he said.
The World Health Organization (WHO) representative
to Indonesia George Peterson said that as long as the bird flu epidemic
still occurs on poultry, there might be occasional human cases of
avian influenza.
Authorities and experts have said the huge territorial
and large amount of backyard-centered chicken farms have hampered
efforts to completely eliminate the highly pathogenic H5N1 in Indonesia.
And 14 out of 61 people contracted with the avian
influenza have survived in Indonesia.
"On human we have seen slightly increasing
cases lately," Peterson told Xinhua.
"I think the most important thing is to control
the epidemic in the bird, and we know that the government together
with donors have bee working on that, that needs to be scaled up,"
he added.
More than a third of the Indonesian territory
has been infected by the avian influenza, according to the health
ministry.
Indonesian Minister of Agriculture Anton Apriantono
told Xinhua that his ministry would carry out a massive vaccination
on hundreds of millions of chickens in the country.
Indonesia reported the biggest cluster in Karo
district in North Sumatra province in May, that killed seven people
linked by blood.
More than 40 million people were killed in a bird
flu pandemic between 1918 to 1919, the WHO has said.
