This SSHAP Case Study illustrates how the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) worked in 2006-07 to support the Indonesian government in response to avian influenza outbreaks.
The agency provided social mobilisation and education programmes to schools and villages in affected communities and provided media relations support and training for Indonesian journalists. Learning from this case study can be used by public health officials and response workers to further their understanding on how to coordinate interactions with affected communities during similar events.
Thailand is centrally located relative to the Avian Influenza epidemic and her response to the disease has important implications for disease control efforts both regionally and globally. A middle income country with a large and economically significant export oriented poultry sector, Thailand has made protection of the broiler industry and preservation of international market access the primary focus of her response. At the same time, policy-makers have needed to assuage small-scale poultry producers, including cockfighting enthusiasts, who have borne the brunt of movement controls and stricter biosecurity standards.
Consequently, the government has re-evaluated its absolute ban on livestock vaccination and implemented innovative strategies such as “bird passports” to reduce the burden of compliance on small producers. Another significant dimension of the Thai epidemic is the recent emergence of open-grazing duck production, which may have provided a reservoir and vector for the H5N1 virus.
Why is the response to H5N1 highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) so challenged in Indonesia? Why did the virus spread so fast, and why has the disease persisted? Are there features of the country and its culture that encourage or inhibit the disease? Is the internationally led response appropriately sensitive to local contexts? This paper suggests that distinctive social, cultural, economic and political factors work against a technocratic response such as has been employed in Indonesia. The paper explores the interactions between global bio-medicine, a mesh of power relations linking health, industry, institutionalism and governance, and Indonesia’s diverse and complex political and social contexts. How is an infectious zoonotic disease controlled in a dynamic environment where modernist models of authority and rationality are unproven?
Since H5N1 was first detected in central Java in mid-2003, it has spread to 31 of Indonesia’s 33 provinces,