Scott McPherson's Web Presence

The situation in Bali worsens with the death of a 40-year-old woman from suspected avian influenza within the city limits of the capital of Denpasar itself.  She had no known contact with poultry, although she lived near a cull of some 6,000 birds, following the initial human cases.  A total of nine people have been hospitalized, two testing positive and a third suspected death caused by the virus but no samples taken (!), and a total of four dead out of the nine suspected cases.

A young 17-year-old housemaid succumbs to H5N1 in Tangerang, just west of Jakarta, despite having no direct contact with poultry.  No less than a half-million chickens, however, are suspected of having died of H5N1 in the region surrounding her home/workplace.  Reports begin to trickle out of Indonesia that chicken farmers have been vaccinating their flocks with H5N2 vaccine, making a new class of poultry -- infected but asymptomatic.  And finally, the Indonesian government decides to stockpile prepandemic vaccine "in people, not in warehouses," evoking the ghosts of the 1976 Swine Flu decision by the Ford Administration here in the United States and yet another poor example of Indonesia thumbing its nose yet again at the WHO.

All this adds up to a horribly mismanaged situation in the nation of 18,000 islands.  And the United States and the UN must take whatever diplomatic steps are necessary to restore confidence (if possible) that the surveillance and eradication programs are meeting global standards. 

Too much is on the line.  It is painfully clear that Health Minister Siti Fadilah Supari is either ridiculously misinformed, or is blindly doing the bidding of those who would profit personally and relentlessly from the Baxter deal.  Newspaper and Internet reports begin to indicate that the Indonesian people themselves might be tiring of her tactics, holding the rest of the world hostage in a viral extortion deal of someone's making -- possibly hers, but I strongly suspect other hands are at work.

If these outbreaks in poultry continue, and if human deaths continue -- especially on the previous paradise known as Bali -- there will almost certainly be growing pressure on the government, from within and from the political opposition parties, and among the general population as a whole, that the nation's leaders have failed to contain the bird flu problem.  We have seen one nation's government overthrown already (Thailand) at least patrially because of the bird flu problem.  Thai leaders' failure to tell the truth about H5N1 outbreaks helped bring down the elected government (the military coup followed a severe outbreak of H5N1, and opposition leaders were constantly denouncing the government's inability to tell the truth to the Thai people.  For a history of Thailand's government lies on H5N1, read Mike Davis' The Monster at our Door).  So the precedent is set.

No one wants to see instability in the political makeup of Indonesia.  Still, the US and the UN have an obligation to make some sense out of what is happening down there.  It is time to bring in the diplomats and start playing hardball with this recalcitrant nation and stop pussy-footing with them.  And since upwards of 20% of all stray cats in Indonesia show antibodies to H5N1, maybe pussy-footing is the right choice of words in more ways than one.