Luh De Suryani , The Jakarta Post , Denpasar | Tue, 02/17/2009 1:43 PM | Bali
The island's tourism industry will not be endangered by avian flu as long as the government incorporates all stakeholders in the containment effort, a leading expert says.
I Gusti Ngurah Mahardhika, head of the Biomedical and Molecular Biology Laboratory at Udayana University's Veterinary Medicine School, said the government should share the virus samples with other institutions to predict the infection route and to study the possibility of whether the virus can infect humans.
"In fact, the Udayana Medical School has the technology to analyze the virus. If we can gain access to the samples gathered by the Animal Husbandry Agency and the Veterinary Main Office, we can help analyze the viruses that spread recently," he said.
He said the results would be useful in finding out where it came from and whether it was already in Bali or from outside the island.
"The most important thing is figuring out whether the viruses that were gathered in 2009 have the potential to infect humans," said Mahardhika, who was the first scientist to identify the existence of bird flu on the island.
Recently, Bali had another brush with bird flu. Early this month, Jagapati village in the Abiansemal district of Badung saw a resurgence of the virus after officials discovered bird flu in five of the 15 birds that suddenly died there.
Mahardhika said laboratory staff had gone to the infected site to gain more insight into the much-dreaded H5N1 virus.
"But we are not an officially designated avian influenza laboratory. We just check the samples we retrieve ourselves from field visits in response to requests from members of the community or companies," he said.
His laboratory does examina-tions of suspected bird flu viruses, which cost Rp 300,000 (US$25) per sample.
"We can usually give the results within a day. In fact, if the sample arrives first thing in the morning, we can give a one-day service," he said.
Periodically, the samples that test positive in Udayana's laboratory get sent to the Eijkman Institute for Molecular Biology in Jakarta.
"Most of the virus sequencing has been sent to the international public database at the Genebank. The information there is very useful to help predict the genetic tendencies of viruses, such as whether it prefers mammals in general or humans in particular," he said.
One example of that was when he predicted that the first human case of bird flu infection would occur in Jembrana in 2006.
"That time, we predicted that the first case would occur either in Jembrana, Buleleng or Klungkung. And we were right. The first case happened in Jembrana," he said.
"And from our studies of the virus in 2007, we believed that the virus that attacked people in Jembrana would be different from the ones that attacked people in Tabanan. Fortunately, the bird flu only struck two people. Or it is possible it attacked more than two but somebody missed it or it went unreported."
Mahardhika said the Udayana Veterinary School was ready to support the Bali government in responding to bird flu in a quid pro quo agreement.
"All we want in return is simple and cheap, and that is the right to publish and communicate the genetic information of the virus to other scientists and the public, locally, nationally and internationally," he said.
hat-tip Dutchy
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