More from indonesia ...

The role of non-governmental organizations in flu-stricken regions hasn't had much scrutiny here—a lapse I intend to remedy. Here's a welcome report from World Vision International's Indonesia office:

Jakarta– Amid the effort to stem the bird flu outbreak, the virus has continued its spread to almost all provinces across the country these last few weeks. More and more people have died because of the infection.

The Jakarta and Surabaya governments – the two largest cities in the country – on Monday, February 19, activated a program to cull chicken affected in the two cities. The program targets all existing chicken at the farms and birds at markets.

The central government promised to allocate funds to compensate the losses suffered by the farmers, but as of Monday the exact compensation for each chicken killed had not yet been decided and many farmers and bird traders were reluctant to follow through withthe government instruction.

“My birds are all healthy," a trader in Jakarta reasoned. "Why should I have to kill them all?"

The avian flu has not shown any sign of abating. It even showed rapid growth and has spread to areas previously unscathed, such as the West Sumatra province. East and West Java have big-scale chicken farms, and they have seen alarming new cases of infections these last two weeks.

"Indonesia is now the second largest in the world in terms of the number of bird flu victims," said West Java Governor Danny Setiawan. "I'm very concerned because West Java province has the highest cases of infections."

The cases of bird flu infections in Indonesia are only smaller than Vietnam. The World Health Organization, as of February 18, confirmed that 19 Indonesians have been killed by the bird flu virus. Out of these number, eight people died in the last 50 days alone – the highest rate of deaths in the world. The last victim, Purnomo (23) who died at a Jakarta hospital last week, was suspected as being infected while trading chicken at a marketplace in East Jakarta.

Scores of patients with bird flu symptoms are currently under intensive treatment in Jakarta, Bandung and other cities. There have been reports of deaths with bird flu symptoms in several smaller cities, such as in Subang, West Java. In most cases, their families buried the bodies without prior inspection of the real cause of their deaths. [my emphasis—CK]

Minister of Health Siti Fadillah Supari indicated that healthy chicken and birds might be able to spread the virus as there were suspected cases of infection where no cases of death of chicken and birds were reported.

There have also been several cases of cluster deaths in several families in Jakarta and Tangerang. More than one person in these families have perished from the bird flu infection, raising concerns of the possibility of human-to-human infection transmission.

The report of "scores of patients" and suspicious deaths is exactly the kind of story that doesn't appear in the Jakarta Post or reports from WHO...and it's exactly what we ought to have.

If anyone knows of similar NGO reports from hot-zone countries, or belongs to an NGO, please let me know. Such organizations obviously have to be tactful with their hosts, but they're not quite as limited in what they can say as government officials and UN bureaucrats must be