Australia will pay for 50,000 doses of an anti-viral drug to combat an outbreak of bird flu in neighbouring Indonesia that Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer said had taken Jakarta by surprise. The H5N1 strain of bird flu has now killed 65 people in four Asian nations – including five people in Indonesia – since late 2003 and has been found in birds in Russia and Europe. The virus has spread to two thirds of Indonesia’s 33 provinces.

Downer said yesterday that Australia would pay for a further 40,000 doses of the anti-viral drug Tamiflu for Indonesia, the world’s fourth most populous nation, on top of an initial 10,000 doses that Canberra said on Friday it would fund. “I think they have been caught a bit short, to tell you the truth, and they are finding it difficult to handle,” Downer told reporters in Adelaide.

“I think they are getting better organised now, particularly with the support of the World Health Organisation (WHO).” The Australia-funded anti-viral doses would be sourced and distributed by the WHO to minimise the risk of it spreading. Downer said the current bird flu outbreak would be high on the agenda at both the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) meeting in Seoul in November and the East Asia Summit in Kuala Lumpur in December.

“We hope by then we can put together, with other countries in the region, a very constructive package ... to make sure we are as best prepared that we can be in the event that avian flu mutates and can be transmitted between people,” he said. The H5N1 strain emerged in Hong Kong in 1997, where it killed six people, and surfaced again on the Korean peninsula in 2003. It has since been found in birds in Cambodia, China, Indonesia, Japan, Kazakhstan, Laos, Malaysia, Mongolia, the Philippines, Russia, Taiwan, Thailand and Vietnam.