Papua (red) Indonesia
#10,754
Although it doesn’t tell us much more than we already knew, the Indonesian Ministry of Health has posted a statement about the unidentified outbreak in Papua, which has been widely reported to have killed between 30 and 56 children (and possibly some adults) in the past several weeks.
The outbreak is in a remote region already known for having little or no medical infrastructure and a very high infant mortality rate.
We’ve seen reports suggesting that this outbreak may be related to a concurrent die off of pigs and chickens in the area, but nearly all of the accounts are second hand information muddled by machine translation. Case counts, time spans, and symptoms described are too vague to even hazard a guess as to the cause.
The Indonesia MOH website was offline yesterday when I checked, but they posted this sometime later in the day.
Kemenkes Investigate death of 31 children in Papua
Jakarta, 27 November 2015
Menkes Nila Moeloek Farid presents to mourn and concerned over the death of 31 children in Papua, the Government responsible for the incident in Papua. The data we receive from the Department of health of Papua Prov. 31 children under the age of 2 years who died since October 2000 to the present.
I've commissioned Director General of disease control and environmental health (P2PL) to send an investigation team to the site, epidemiologic investigations (verification and investigation), recounts the Menkes (27/11).
Menkes stated that field trips to locations quite far and heavy. The current rapid response team from the Ministry of health surveillance and the R & D team is already leading to the location, i.e. the Nduga Regency Mbua village, Papua Province.
As soon as the team reached the site will report the results of the epidemiological investigation further, hopefully by that time the situation has been more clearly so that we can determine the next step, the light of Menkes.
Related to this, Menkes was already commissioned the Director-General of disease control and environmental health to convene the meeting, currently underway cross-Ministry coordination meeting/related agencies, among others the BNPB, the Ministry of agriculture and the TNI.
The news was broadcast by a public Communication Centre, the Secretariat-General of the Ministry of health of INDONESIA. For more information please contact Halo Kemkes through hotline < codes locale > 1500-586; 081281562620 SMS, facsimile: (021) 52921669, and the contact email address [at] kemkes [dot] go [dot] id. -
