The Indonesian Government appealed for calm yesterday and insisted it was able to handle an outbreak of bird flu that has killed four people in the country.

The call came after three more people with flu-like symptoms were admitted to hospital in the capital late on Monday, hours after the government put the country on high alert.

"The public need not panic. We only have four deaths, still far below Viet Nam and Thailand," Co-ordinating Minister for Social Affairs Alwi Shihab told reporters after a special cabinet meeting on the bird flu threat.

The highly pathogenic H5N1 strain of bird flu has killed 64 people in four Asian countries since late 2003 and has spread to Russia and Europe. Viet Nam's bird flu death toll stands at 44 and 12 have died in Thailand.

The latest suspected cases in Indonesia included a worker and two food vendors at the city's main zoo, which was closed after tests found some exotic birds in the zoo's collection were infected with avian influenza.

A state of high alert means authorities can order people showing symptoms of the virus to be sent to hospital.

"This is to calm people, not to bring more panic. The government is ready to overcome this," Health Minister Siti Fadilah Supari said yesterday.

"Six people have now been hospitalized (in Jakarta), two are almost certain to have bird flu, while the other four are still under observation," she added.

Earlier yesterday, Shihab said the government would bear the costs of treatment for poor people admitted to hospital.

Limited chance of containment

In another development, a top World Health Organization (WHO) official leading the fight against bird flu in Asia said that the world has slim chance to stop the pandemic.

The initial outbreak of a bird flu pandemic may not be very contagious, affecting only a few people, giving the world just weeks to contain the deadly virus before it spreads and kills millions.

But the chance of containment is limited as the pandemic may not be detected until it has already spread to several countries, like the SARS virus in 2003, and avian flu vaccines developed in advance will have little impact on the pandemic virus.

It will take scientists four to six months to develop a vaccine that protects against the pandemic virus, by which time thousands could have died. There is little likelihood a vaccine will even reach the country where the pandemic starts.

That is the scenario outlined yesterday by Dr Hitoshi Oshitani, the man who was on the frontline in the battle against SARS and now leads the fight against avian flu in Asia.

"SARS in retrospect was an easy virus to contain," said Oshitani, the WHO's Asian communicable diseases expert.

"The pandemic virus is much more difficult, maybe impossible, to contain once it starts," he said at a WHO conference in Noumea, capital of the French Pacific territory of New Caledonia.

(China Daily September 21, 2005)