Influenza Virus Mashup

Via The Jakarta Post: The end of an era, toward a new beginning. Excerpt:

Despite a bureaucratic vacuum in commissions designated to combat the H5N1 and H1N1 influenzas, a health officials says the country remains well prepared to fight outbreaks of disease. 

While the term of the national avian influenza commission comes to a close this March, a new commission to combat H5N1 and H1N1 is yet to be established. 

Bayu Krisnamurthi, the chairman of the National Commission for Bird Flu Control and Pandemic Influenza Preparedness (Komnas FBPI), said that agriculture and health ministries would fill the hiatus until the planned national commission of zoonosis was fully established. 

“It has all been planned,” Bayu told The Jakarta Post. 

He said the new commission would handle a wider scope of diseases transmissible from animals to humans and would have a different member and organizational structures than Komnas FBPI. 

Bayu said that more details about the zoonosis commission would be announced on Wednesday.
Komnas FBPI was formed in 2006, after a presidential decree issued by President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono. 

More than 40 people died from avian influenza in Indonesia in 2006. 

Komnas FBPI, then chaired by current Golkar Party head Aburizal Bakrie, launched an intensive campaign to curb the spread of the virus. 

According to data from the World Health Organization, the number of deaths due to Avian Influenza A (H5N1) in Indonesia gradually decreased from 45 in 2006, to 37 in 2007 and 19 in 2009.

I don’t begin to understand the real reasons behind this bureaucratic shuffle, but I wish the new commission well. As I’m learning, countries like Indonesia really do have more to worry about than just one disease.