Warning on Indonesia bird flu risk

I Wayan Teguh Wibawan, a researcher at the Bogor Institute of Agriculture (IPB), said at a seminar on Saturday that Indonesian farmers sometimes kept chickens and ducks in close quarters, a practice also carried out by their Chinese equivalents.

The Jakarta Globe reported that allowing animals to sleep, eat and defecate in the same space is a key factor in the spread of bird flu.

"This tends to facilitate the spread of the H7N9 virus," the researcher said, calling on farmers to take action to separate farm animals and limit the number kept in any one place, to avoid overcrowding.

"The government should also work to increase farmers' awareness and tighten monitoring," he added.

Although the Indonesian government has confirmed some cases of H7N9 infection in poultry, there have been no reports of human infections from the new strain in the country.

The H7N9 virus was first reported to have spread from chickens to humans in late March, with most cases confined to eastern China.

The World Health Organisation says there is no evidence to suggest that the new strain is easily transmitted between humans.

However, 40% of the 130 people infected did not appear to have had contact with poultry, so the WHO is investigating the possibility of human-to-human transmission.

The head of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said the current strain of bird flu could not spark a pandemic in its current form, though there is the chance that it could mutate.

Earlier this month, immunologists expressed concern about the "dangerous" work of scientists in China who have created a hybrid bird flu virus by mixing genes from H5N1 "bird flu" and H1N1 "swine flu". The new virus, which can spread in the air between guinea pigs, is being kept in a lab freezer.

Jeremy Farrar, director of the Oxford University Clinical Research Unit in Vietnam, told Nature News that H5N1 continued to pose a very real threat but that research into the virus should be better regulated.

"I do believe such research is critical to our understanding of influenza. But such work, anywhere in the world, needs to be tightly regulated and conducted in the most secure facilities, which are registered and certified to a common international standard," he said.