Indonesia fails in bird flu fight

Muntilan, Indonesia: When chickens began dying at his local market, Darmanto gratefully collected them from vendors, chopped them up and tossed the raw meat to his pet catfish.

He never wore gloves, and remembers smoking a cigarette with a bloody hand as he watched hundreds of fish greedily gobble up the scrawny black carcasses.

The thought of bird flu never crossed Darmanto's mind, it couldn't. He had never heard of it until he himself became ill, hospitalised with a burning 41 C fever, a racing heart and a tightness in his chest that left him struggling to breathe.

Indonesia has the second-highest number of human deaths from the H5N1 virus (32) and has come under fire for failing to slow the spread of the virus where others, like Vietnam, have succeeded thanks largely to strong political will and vaccination campaigns.

It has so far refused to carry out mass culls of poultry in all infected areas, one of the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation's most basic containment guidelines, saying it cannot afford to compensate farmers.

Bio-security measures are virtually nonexistent and, as Darmanto's case illustrates, there is a lack of awareness about bird flu in the densely populated countryside, home to hundreds of millions of backyard chickens.

"If I had known about bird flu, I would have done a lot of things differently, I would have taken precautions to protect myself and my family," said the father of two, who does not understand even today how he could get sick from dead chicken, or how he survived.

Darmanto, 46, attributes his good fortune to "traditional herbal medicine, a strong spirit, and the will to live."