Hundreds of volunteers and health workers hunted door-to-door for birds, testing them for avian influenza. (Reuters)

JAKARTA, February 25, 2006 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) – Indonesia, which confirmed on Saturday, February 25, its 20^th bird flu human fatality, is championing a high-profile door-to-door checks campaign of poultry and birds in an effort to curb the fatal disease.

"We culled a total of 580 chickens and birds in Central and East Jakarta districts on Friday," Adnan Arman, Jakarta's deputy chief of animal husbandry and fisheries agency, told Agence France-Presse (AFP).

The campaign, launched at an outdoor ceremony by Agriculture Minister Anton Apriyantono and Jakarta's Governor Sutiyoso on Friday, February 24, is expected to run for three months and focus on areas known to have high numbers of birds including poultry.

Hundreds of volunteers and workers hunted door-to-door for birds, testing them for avian influenza.

The government was initially accused of covering up outbreaks in birds and has since been criticized for dragging its feet to act against the steady march of the H5N1 virus across the archipelago nation, the world's most populous Muslim country.

The H5N1 virus has killed tens of millions of birds since 2003.

The government has finally decided to begin mass culls of poultry and pet birds wherever cases of avian influenza have been detected, reported The Jakarta Post on Saturday.

It is offering bird owners 10,000 rupiah (one dollar) for each bird culled.

But traders and poultry breeders has dismissed the figure as too low, saying the cheapest fresh chicken sold on the market fetches around 15,000 rupiah.

Some traders at the Pramuka bird market in East Jakarta have even vowed "to take up arms" if officials came for their birds.

They maintain that their birds were worth hundreds of thousands or even millions of rupiah.

Poultry breeders also have warned their businesses would collapse if they received low compensation.

However, bird owners who breed them at homes have a different opinion.

"I have no problem if my birds are killed. I will wholeheartedly surrender them, because this is for our own health," said 60-year-old Ichsan who owns 20 birds.

"Rather than us being infected, it's better if the birds are killed," he added.

Other owners cited emotional ties with birds – like pet owners - as a reason for objecting the culling.

For many Indonesians, especially Javanese, birds are the most common pets.

In another development, Indonesia confirmed Saturday its 20^th human bird flu fatality.

A housewife who had direct contact with her neighbor's chickens was admitted to a hospital in Jakarta on Monday and died the same day, hospital spokesman Ilham Patu said.

Her test results came back from a World Health Organization (WHO) affiliated laboratory in the US on Saturday.

Blood tests on members of her family had been performed but none of them had fallen ill so far.

Health Minister Siti Fadilah Supari had told a press briefing that the government planned to buy seven million tablets of the antiviral drug Tamiflu -- the best known defense against bird flu infection -- by September.

Another health official said the government had allocated 200 billion rupiah (21.7 million dollars) from its budget to buy the drug.

Experts fear that H5N1, which has killed more than 90 people mostly in Asia since 2003, may mutate into a form that can pass between humans, sparking a pandemic that could kill millions.

International donors have pledged $1.9 billion to support a global fund to combat bird flu.