Indonesia 'needs bird flu help'

Indonesia needs more help to rein in the bird flu virus, the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation has said. The human death toll from bird flu in the country rose to 100 earlier this year - almost half of the total worldwide fatalities. The FAO's chief veterinary expressed concerns that failure to tackle the disease could lead the virus to mutate and cause a "human influenza pandemic".

Most of those infected are thought to have caught the disease from poultry. "The human mortality rate from bird flu in Indonesia is the highest in the world and there will be more human cases if we do not focus more on containing the disease at source in animals," said FAO Chief Veterinary Officer Joseph Domenech in a statement on Tuesday. "The avian influenza situation in Indonesia is grave - all international partners and national authorities need to step up their efforts for halting the spread of the disease in animals and making the fight against the virus a top priority." Mr Domenech also expressed concerns about a possible mutation of the virus which could be easily passed from human to human. "Furthermore, I am deeply concerned that the high level of virus circulation in birds in the country could create conditions for the virus to mutate and to finally cause a human influenza pandemic," he said. Endemic Surveillance and response teams are working in 193 out of 448 districts in Indonesia, yet birds in 31 out of 33 provinces are affected, Mr Domenech said.

Indonesia is facing an uphill battle against a virus that is difficult to contain Joseph Domenech FAO chief veterinary officer The virus is endemic in Java, Sumatra, Bali and southern Sulawesi with sporadic outbreaks reported from other areas, the FAO said. By June 2008, more than 2,000 surveillance and response teams will be active in more than 300 districts in areas of the country where the disease is endemic, Mr Domenech said. But that may not be enough. "Indonesia is facing an uphill battle against a virus that is difficult to contain. Major human and financial resources, stronger political commitment and strengthened co-ordination between the central, provincial and district authorities are required to improve surveillance and control measures," Mr Domenech said. Since the first outbreaks in 2003, bird flu has spread rapidly across Java into Bali, Kalimantan and Sumatra. In 2006, the virus spread further east infecting Papua and much of Sulawesi. Since the H5N1 virus emerged in South East Asia in late 2003, it has claimed more than 220 lives around the world.

Comments

Nine of Indonesia’s 11 richest families have found shelter in tropical tax havens

Billionaires Among Thousands of Indonesians Found in Secret Offshore Documents By Nicky Hager April 9, 2013, 8:15 pm Nine of Indonesia’s 11 richest families have found shelter in tropical tax havens, holding ownership of more than 190 offshore trusts and companies, secret records obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists show. The nine families, worth an estimated $36 billion among them, are at the top of a wealthy class that dominates Indonesia’s politics and economy. Six were closely tied to the late dictator Suharto, who helped a special circle of Indonesians grow rich during his 31-year rule by granting economic fiefdoms to family and friends. The billionaires are among nearly 2,500 Indonesians found in the files of Singapore-headquart ered offshore services provider Portcullis TrustNet, which ICIJ has been analyzing and began reporting on last week. Although there is no evidence in the files of illegality by any of the ni...

Debate Islam in Indonesia

http://www.thejakar taglobe.com/ opinion/interloc utors-of- indonesian- islam/560447 Interlocutors of Indonesian Islam Ahmad Najib Burhani | December 08, 2012 A few months ago, the Japanese anthropologist Mitsuo Nakamura told me that studying Nahdlatul Ulama as an organization was beyond the imagination of any American scholar from the 1950s to the ’70s. But he is not the only academic to have noticed this. George McT. Kahin of Cornell University stated the same thing. Even NU-expert Martin van Bruinessen was not expecting to study NU as his primary focus when he came to Indonesia for the first time in the 1980s. During the early decades of Indonesian independence, NU was relatively unorganized and its management was largely based on the authority of religious teachers ( kyai ). Of course there were a number of scholars who studied NU-affiliated religious schools ( pesantren ) and its kyai, but not NU as an organization. Even though NU was one of the ...

is that true in Indonesia there freedom of religion?

The problems began shortly after Tajul Muluk, a Shiite cleric, opened a boarding school in 2004. The school, in a predominantly Sunni Muslim part of East Java, raised local tensions, and in 2006 it was attacked by thousands of villagers. When a mob set fire to the school and several homes last December, many Shiites saw it as just the latest episode in a simmering sectarian conflict — one that they say has been ignored by the police and exploited by Islamists purporting to preserve the purity of the Muslim faith. Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim-majority country, has long been considered a place where different religious and ethnic groups can live in harmony and where Islam can work with democracy. But that perception has been repeatedly brought into question lately. In East Java, Sunni leaders are pushing the provincial government to adopt a regulation limiting the spread of Shiite Islam. It would prevent the country’s two major Shiite organizations from ...

INDONESIA A NEWS

Search This Blog