Indonesia Taps Village Wisdom to Fight Bird Flu

In this article, Dennis Normile describes participatory epidemiology, a new approach that is being used in Indonesia to combat avian influenza. The approach, pioneered by veterinarians Christine Jost and Jeffrey Mariner to counter rinderpest in Africa, focuses on community engagement, and involves recruiting community members to participate in both disease surveillance and response efforts. The participatory approach directly involves villagers in decisions surrounding control efforts, such as the culling of poultry, compensation and vaccination.

The programme was set up in early 2006 to track outbreaks of the highly pathogenic avian flu, as teams of veternarians traveled from door to door on the island of Java asking villagers about outbreaks among their poultry. According to the article, this method revealed an alarming amount of previously undetected outbreaks across the island.

While the success of the programme has lead to an expansion into Bali and Sumatra, financial support has been slow to come from the Indonesian government. According to the article, increased funding is needed to bring bird flu under control as "the surveillance and response teams are just one link in an animal health infrastructure that should stretch from basic labs capable of tracking changes in the virus and verifying the efficacy of vaccines to better oversight of commercial poultry operations to a consistent response coordinated among all levels of government.

Click here to link to a summary of this article on the SciDev.net website through which you may access the full article on the Science website.