# 1151
Doing their best Claude Rains imitation, officials in Jakarta are reportedly shocked to find that chickens are still being kept in Jakarta neighborhoods.
Community indifference seen hampering fight against bird flu
City News - Wednesday, October 03, 2007
The Jakarta Post, Jakarta
Within five months, a family from Rawa Buaya subdistrict in West Jakarta lost two children to what was diagnosed as typhoid fever by doctors at the Sumber Waras Hospital.
AR, 22, died last Friday after suffering from high fever, headaches and respiratory problems. His 19-year-old sister died after suffering similar symptoms in April.
However, on Monday the Health Ministry confirmed that the cause of both deaths was avian influenza.
The virus has infected 107 people and killed 86 throughout Indonesia since 2005. Jakarta alone has reported 26 bird flu cases, 23 of which led to deaths.
The family doubted the findings of the Health Ministry, arguing that the siblings had not been exposed to the virus.
"We don't keep poultry in the back yard. My son was never in contact with poultry and he didn't eat chicken before he became ill," the mother said Tuesday.
"He worked at his uncle's kiosk at the Kemiri market. The shop doesn't sell chickens, but it is near a group of kiosks selling chickens," she said.
She also told The Jakarta Post some of her neighbors kept chickens, pigeons and ducks in their yards and in the narrow alleyways in the semi-slum area.
Meanwhile, the head of the neighborhood unit, Mamat, 50, said the two siblings helped sell their uncle's chickens at Kemiri market before their deaths.
"The two of them helped clean up and slaughter chickens," said Mamat.
He said while he could prevent the further spread of the virus at home, he could do nothing about the market.
"I can only ask people in my own neighborhood to kill their poultry, and even that is a very hard job. Although the February floods washed away some of their poultry, they got more animals from their hometowns.
"Many of them hide the birds from me and deny that they keep them," Mamat said.
The ministry confirmed city administration officials had been called in to cull most of the poultry in the area.
"I killed any remaining birds by shooting them with a gun," Mamat said.
The head of West Jakarta's animal husbandry and fisheries office, Chaidir Taufik, said the agency carried out bird flu prevention activities in the area following the February floods.
"We thought there were no more birds in the area and we were quite surprised with the deaths and with our findings in the raid yesterday. We found over 100 chickens," he said.
Chaidir said the administration was yet to do anything to prevent the spread of bird flu in the Kemiri market, saying that West Jakarta had too many markets for the administration's staff.
"The area has a total of 68 large and neighborhood markets and I only have around 40 people," he said.
After inspecting the market Monday, Chaidir concluded that AR could have contracted the virus from there.
He told the Post he had taken blood samples from poultry in the area, but was still waiting for the results.
