Indonesia warned yesterday that it could lose a million jobs because of an outbreak of bird flu while China, stung by criticism of its slow response to SARS last year, ordered its officials to act quickly and honestly in telling people about the outbreak of the disease.
But as nations culled tens of millions of chickens to curb the illness's spread, the World Health Organization warned that the disease could infect workers killing the birds unless they use masks, gloves and other protection -- which many are not.
Indonesia, which has for days insisted a large-scale slaughter was not necessary, has reversed that decision and ordered a mandatory mass cull of chickens in infected areas.
Sofyan Sudrajad, director general of the Agriculture Ministry's animal husbandry department, said the country could suffer as much as 7.7 trillion rupiah (US$916 million) in losses from the outbreak, and it could leave a total of 1.25 million people jobless.
A senior official in Vietnam -- where authorities have reported eight deaths from the illness -- said a nationwide cull of all poultry may be needed to curb the disease's spread.
"We all know that it would be safer and we can eliminate the sources of the disease if a mass cull is carried out," Bui Quang Anh, director of the Veterinary Department, told Thanh Nien newspaper.
But television and newspaper images from across Asia of barehanded people, without goggles or masks, flinging chicken carcasses into mass graves or stuffing live ones into sacks have set off alarm bells within the UN health agency.
"They are trying to eliminate the animal reservoir, which is what we want, but if they are exposing themselves to the virus while they're doing that it might defeat the purpose," said Maria Cheng, a spokeswoman for WHO's infectious diseases unit.
"We see people with bare hands, their eyes, their nose and their mouth uncovered, where they are possibly breathing in virus," Cheng said, adding that the unsafe practices were "going on pretty much everywhere."
Experts fear that the next global flu pandemic could be triggered by someone catching the bird flu sweeping Asian poultry farms while infected with a standard human variety of flu. The danger is that the two viruses could swap genes to produce a hybrid with the deadliness of the bird variety and the contagiousness of the human type.
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