WHO Team Refused Access

.....In an interview with The Washington Post this spring, Tri Satya Putri Naipospos, Indonesia's national director of animal health, first disclosed that officials had known chickens were dying from bird flu since the middle of 2003, but kept this secret until last year because of lobbying by the poultry industry.

She also revealed that the government had not set aside any money this year to vaccinate poultry against the virus, though officials had trumpeted this as the centerpiece of their strategy to contain the disease.

Naipospos repeated her allegations late last month, but this time in Indonesian in an interview with the influential local newspaper Kompas.

A day after the article was published, the Agriculture Ministry fired her.

Naipospos alleged that bird flu has never been a priority in the Agriculture Ministry. "They could not see the potential threat until there was an actual threat," she said in an interview with The Post last week. "I talked to the minister about it many times. He said a disease outbreak is not a national emergency, not a disaster."

Agriculture Minister Anton Apriyantono said the Indonesian government considers bird flu a matter of great concern. Every morning, he said, he files a report with President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono on efforts to battle the disease.

"That means our attention is very high on how to address this problem," the minister said during an interview in his office. "The thing is, we don't want to publicize too much about bird flu because of the effect on our farms. Prices have dropped very drastically."

Apriyantono said he fired Naipospos because he was not happy with her handling of bird flu and her working relationship with top ministry officials.

When the virus first appeared in Indonesia in the summer of 2003, government officials were divided over whether the sudden death of hens on a commercial farm on Java island was caused by bird flu or a less virulent ailment, Newcastle disease.

Nidom, a professor at Indonesia's Airlangga University, was called in. Within two months, he said his laboratory research had determined that the ailment was indeed bird flu, and was genetically related to a strain found seven years earlier in southern China.

But the owners of major poultry companies, who have personal ties to senior Agriculture Ministry officials, insisted that any containment efforts be done secretly, Naipospos recalled.

These eight farming conglomerates, which handle 60 percent of the country's poultry, feared that publicity would harm sales of chicken and eggs. Offering new details in her interview last week, Naipospos said owners even lobbied Indonesia's president at the time, Megawati Sukarnoputri. "They said: `It's better to do it with confidentiality. Do a hidden, silent operation'," Naipospos recounted. "I said, `It won't work if you do a silent operation. This is a disease that can't be hidden. It's too risky'."

In late January 2004, Nidom broke ranks and announced his findings to the Indonesian media. A day later, the Agriculture Ministry confirmed the bird flu outbreak. But the disease had already spread across Java and on to Bali and Sumatra islands.

"It was too late. The virus was everywhere," Nidom recalled.

Last fall, with human cases mounting in Vietnam and Thailand, Nidom was growing increasingly nervous about the prospect of the epidemic spreading to Indonesians. He arranged an October conference at his university to examine bird flu and invited four of the world's premier influenza researchers from the United States, Japan, Hong Kong and mainland China.

Shortly before its scheduled start, a senior agriculture official contacted the head of Nidom's institute and demanded that foreign participants and all media be banned, according to Yoes Prijatna Dachlan, chairman of the university's Tropical Disease Center. Dachlan rejected the conditions and canceled the gathering. Nidom said officials threatened to have police break up the conference if it proceeded.

Apriyantono said in the interview that he was unfamiliar with the incident, but that Indonesia was open to foreign researchers. Through this summer, avian flu continued to spread, often unreported, and containment efforts remained unfunded. The disease reached two-thirds of the country's provinces. Then in July, a man and his two daughters in an affluent Jakarta suburb died of respiratory disease. The father tested positive as the country's first bird flu victim. Health investigators concluded that his daughters likely died of the same cause.

Responding to public anxiety, Apriyantono went on television to oversee the culling of several dozen pigs and ducks on a farm 15 kilometers away.

But when the cameras left, the campaign stalled. Officials backed away from a vow to kill about 200 swine in the immediate area. Thousands of chickens, identified by health experts as the leading suspects in the outbreak, escaped slaughter.

As suspected human cases mounted last month, government officials said they would take extraordinary measures. Apriyantono announced that he was changing course and would order a mass slaughter of poultry in any area declared highly infected.

But, one month later, Apriyantono acknowledged that he had yet to define such an area. As a result, he has now directed that culling be limited to the specific property where an infection is detected and that neighboring birds be spared. "