WHO puts Roche on alert, and three more flu deaths confirmed

The World Health Organization put the maker of the global stockpile of the anti-bird flu drug Tamiflu on alert for the first time after human-to-human transmission was suspected in Indonesia, officials said Saturday.

The organization said that a precautionary 9,500 treatment doses, along with protective gear, were flown into Indonesia on Friday, but the shipment was not expected to be followed by further movement of the drug.

"We have no intention of shipping that stockpile," WHO spokesman Dick Thompson said.

An Indonesian health official, meanwhile, said tests had confirmed five more cases of bird flu, three of them fatal.

One of those cases was of a 32-year-old man who on Monday became the last fatality in a human cluster in Kubu Simbelang, a village of about 1,500 people in North Sumatra.

Roche spokesman Baschi Duerr said the stockpile, which consists of 3 million treatment courses kept in Europe and the United States, is ready to be shipped at any time to any place.

Pieters stressed the alert was part of standard operating procedure when WHO has "reasonable doubt" about a situation that could involve human-to-human transmission. He said Roche would remain on alert for approximately the next two weeks, or twice the incubation period of the last reported case.

On Saturday, Nyoman Kandun, a director general at Indonesia's health ministry, said a WHO laboratory in Hong Kong has confirmed five more cases of human bird flu, three of which were fatal.

All five had earlier tested positive for the H5N1 virus in a local laboratory. Bird flu has now infected 48 people in Indonesia, and 36 of them have died.

Indonesia's number of human bird flu cases has jumped rapidly this year, but public awareness of the disease remains low and government commitment has not equaled that of other countries. Indonesia's reaction has raised concerns it is moving slowly and ineffectively in containing the disease.

Indonesia, a sprawling nation of 17,000 islands, has refused to carry out mass slaughters of poultry in all infected areas - one of the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization's most basic containment guidelines - saying it cannot afford to compensate farmers. And bio-security measures are virtually nonexistent in the densely populated countryside, home to hundreds of millions of backyard chickens.

The latest confirmed deaths were a 39-year-old man from Jakarta, a 10-year-old girl from West Java and the 32-year-old man in the North Sumatra cluster.

The organization has said that limited human-to-human transmission is believed to have occurred in about four previous clusters. It was not immediately clear why WHO had not ordered previous alerts for the global stockpile.

Source: Santa Barbara News-Press: WHO puts bird flu drug stockpile maker on alert; three flu more deaths confirmed

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