The bird flu alert in Jakarta, where four people have died and 10 people are under hospital observation, does not mean the avian flu outbreak has worsened, the World Health Organization said on Thursday.
The WHO said increased surveillance by the Indonesian government could explain the rise in cases being uncovered, adding there was still no evidence that the risk of human-to-human transmission of the disease was any greater.
“With increased surveillance its not unusual that you would pick up more cases,” said Dr Margaret Chan, the WHO’s global special representative on avian flu.
“So far there is no evidence for increased chance of human-to-human transmission,” Chan told Reuters by telephone from Sydney after attending a WHO conference in Noumea, capital of New Caledonia in the South Pacific.
Indonesian doctors are observing 10 patients with bird flu-like symptoms, a senior health official said on Thursday, amid fears a deadly avian influenza outbreak was spreading in the Indonesian capital.
Four Indonesians are already confirmed to have died since July from the highly pathogenic H5N1 strain of bird flu, which has killed 64 people in four Asian countries since late 2003 and has been found in birds in Russia and Europe.
Alert level at 'three'
Despite the spread of the disease and developments in Indonesia, the avian flu outbreak was still at a level three alert on a scale of six, said Chan.
“Until we see further evidence we are still at phase three of the pandemic alert,” said Chan, director of health in Hong Kong in 1997 when H5N1 first appeared, infecting 18 and killing six. Chan ordered the culling of 1.5 million birds in Hong Kong.
Under the alert system: level one is no outbreak, level two poultry outbreaks, level 3 poultry and human cases, level four small clusters of human transmission, level five large, localized clusters of human transmission and level six a pandemic with large scale human transmissions in several countries.
The WHO says health officials will have about 21 days in which to contain the first cluster of human-to-human transmission before the disease rapidly spreads into other countries and becomes a pandemic, possibly killing millions.
The WHO plans a mass treatment with the anti-viral drug Tamiflu in cluster areas in the hope of containing the disease.
In the meantime, it is urging countries to cull infected poultry as the best method of stopping the disease spreading in Asia where people and poultry live side by side.
The Indonesian government has launched a vaccination drive for poultry but carried out only limited culling because it does not have enough money to compensate farmers.
