First pigs slaughtered in bird flu scare
Indonesia today became the first known country to destroy pigs in its efforts to contain the rapid spread of bird flu, which has killed at least 57 people across Asia and devastated poultry stocks.
But plans to slaughter 200 swine were sharply reduced as authorities wrangled over the best way to combat the deadly disease.
Eighteen pigs that tested positive for the H5N1 strain of the virus were killed on two farms on the outskirts of Jakarta, the capital. After being injected with drugs that rendered them unconscious, they were loaded on trucks, taken to a field and thrown into a fire.
Healthy animals escaped the culls, despite Agriculture Minister Anton Apriyantono’s earlier pledge to kill all birds and pigs on farms hit by the deadly avian influenza.
“If we kill all, healthy and sick, it guarantees nothing because the virus can be spread in the air,” he said at an event that appeared to be orchestrated largely for television cameras. “We only want to kill those that are infected.”
The farms targeted today were nine miles from the home of three family members who earlier this month became the first people in Indonesia to die of bird flu, a 38-year-old foreign ministry worker and his two daughters, aged nine and one.
Authorities still do not know where they contracted the disease – they had no known contact with birds – but decided to start with the closest point of infection, Tangerang.
Apriyantono said farmers who lost pigs to the government’s culling campaign would be compensated, most of them with cows.
Bird flu has swept through poultry populations in large swaths of Asia since 2003, killing or forcing the slaughter of hundreds of millions of ducks and chickens. It also jumped to humans, killing 57 regionwide, most of them in Vietnam and Thailand.
In May, an Indonesian scientist said he found H5N1 in blood samples taken from pigs, which are genetically similar to people and often carry the human influenza virus, findings that were somewhat controversial.
Experts worry that pigs infected with both bird flu and its human equivalent could act as a “mixing bowl,” resulting in a more dangerous, mutant virus that might spread to people more easily – and then from person to person.
They fear that could fuel a devastating flu outbreak, vastly exceeding the current annual death toll from human influenza, which kills 500,000 to one million people around the world each year.
Preparing for the worst, Indonesia’s health ministry warned last week that 44 hospitals nationwide had been put on alert to receive and treat bird flu patients.
