I should have posted this a couple of days ago when it was published: Cumulative Number of Confirmed Human Cases of Avian Influenza A/(H5N1) Reported to WHO.
As you’ll see, it’s a table going back to 2003, showing a total of 431 cases and 262 deaths, for a case fatality ratio of 60.7%.
But look at Indonesia: last year they reported 24 cases and 20 deaths, for a CFR of 83.3%. (Their cumulative CFR is 81.5%.) And this year we see nothing. That’s because the health minister has deliberately broken the International Health Regulations and failed to report human H5N1 cases promptly, as the IHR require.
WHO can’t do anything about it, though no doubt the organization knows exactly how many Indonesians have contracted H5N1 this year. But without being officially informed, they can’t list them.
That means we have a faulty sense of the spread of H5N1 in Indonesia. We also have a very poor sense of how the government and its healthcare workers are dealing with the disease.
It probably doesn’t matter as long as H5N1 is chiefly a rare disease of Asian and Egyptian villagers. But if it ever learned to spread efficiently from human to human, it would make the swine-flu scare look trivial. Then Indonesia’s neighbours, not to mention China, North America, and the US, would put intense pressure on Jakarta to smarten up.
Until then, H5N1 will fester in the villages of Sumatra and the sprawling suburbs of Jakarta, forgotten but far from gone.
