Indonesia to make anti-viral drug Tamiflu

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Indonesia will go ahead and make the anti-viral drug Tamiflu to build up stocks in preparation for more human cases of deadly bird flu, Health Minister Siti Fadillah Supari said on Friday.

While she told reporters that Roche AG had given Jakarta permission to make the drug, the Swiss pharmaceutical giant said it did not have a patent for the medication in Indonesia. “We have informed Indonesia that we do not have a patent (in Indonesia) so they are free to produce it for local markets,” a spokeswoman for Roche in Basel said. “If they want to produce they can go ahead. There is no need for them to get a licence.”

Supari said Indonesia was in the process of obtaining the raw materials from Korea, but she gave no details. Patents for Tamiflu in major markets are held by Gilead Sciences Inc, while Roche Holding AG holds a development and licensing agreement.

Indonesia has said its stocks of anti-viral drugs to treat H5N1 avian influenza were way short of what was needed. Officials have given conflicting numbers on stocks, but the president has said he wants enough medication to treat 11 percent of the country’s 220 million people.

Indonesia has recorded seven confirmed human deaths from the H5N1 avian virus since July. Many countries in Asia have been stockpiling anti-viral drugs such as Tamiflu or Relenza, which is made by GlaxoSmithKline, or have said they would make it themselves in the event of a pandemic.

“NOT LIKE MAKING ICE-CREAM”

I Nyoman Kandun, director-general of disease control at the Health Ministry, said no local firms had been appointed to make Tamiflu. “In their letter (Roche) said the Indonesian government is free to manufacture Tamiflu at its discretion and without paying compensation for intellectual property rights to Roche,” he said. “(But) it is not as simple as making an ice cream.”

Earlier, Jakarta said hundreds of chickens had died of bird flu in Indonesia’s Aceh in recent weeks, the first cases detected in the tsunami-hit province. Syamsul Bahri, director of Animal Health at the Agriculture Ministry, said the outbreak surfaced among backyard chickens in three areas largely spared from the Dec. 26 tsunami that left 170,000 people dead or missing. There had been no suspected human cases in Aceh, he said.

Bahri said the outbreaks had not been detected in or near tented camps and barracks where hundreds of thousands of survivors of the tsunami disaster are still living.

Millions of chickens and other birds in Indonesia have died from the disease or been killed to prevent its spread since bird flu was first detected in fowl in the world’s fourth-most-populous country in 2003. The virus has been detected among poultry in two-thirds of Indonesia’s 33 provinces.

Scientists fear the virus could mutate into a form, which can pass easily among humans and trigger a global pandemic that could kill millions.

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