Chickens roam free just a couple of minutes' walk from Jakarta's central business district and elsewhere in Indonesia it is common to see poultry workers handling dead birds, mucus dripping from beaks, with bare hands.
Despite a steady rise in the number of human infections and outbreaks in poultry, government campaigns to stop the H5N1 bird flu virus and protect flocks and people have not reached the masses in the vast archipelago of 17,000 islands.
After its first known outbreak in chickens in Indonesia in October 2003, H5N1 is now endemic in almost all 33 provinces and has infected 48 people, killing 37 of them - the second highest total in the world after Vietnam.
Officials readily admit to lapses in handling the problem in a country which stretches 5,000 km from east to west and where more than half its 220 million population live on less than $2 a day.
"There are sporadic outbreaks but they are hard to monitor. Some are far from the centre where there are no veterinary services," said Abdul Adjid, of Indonesia's Veterinary Research Institute, the country's top facility for testing animal samples.
"Public awareness is low and (messages) don't reach the remote areas."
Such words will do little to reassure the medical community, which has warned repeatedly that the more entrenched the virus is in poultry and humans, the more opportunities it will have to mutate.
If it adapts to humans and spreads easily among people, experts fear it could trigger a pandemic, killing millions.
Jakarta argues that it has not been remiss. Since 2004, it says it has vaccinated 70 percent of its estimated one billion chickens - but backyard poultry, believed to have been the source for many human infections, are the problem.
"Chickens surround us," said I Nyoman Kandun, a leading health ministry official for communicable diseases. "They are wandering about."
Bayu Krisnamurthi, who works with a national anti-bird flu taskforce, agreed backyard chickens were a liability. "If you just walk around, you will realise the problem we face."
The government has carried out only limited culling, saying it can't afford the compensation. "We can afford to pay only 10,000 rupiah ($1) a chicken," said Krisnamurthi.
A full-grown chicken costs 35,000 rupiah in Jakarta, prompting some poor villagers to keep quiet and eat dead birds rather then give them up for culling.
What is most worrying is how human cases are often shrouded in mystery with officials unable to say whether the virus is in the environment or how widely it has spread - which means H5N1 outbreaks in poultry essentially go uncontrolled.
In a cluster in north Sumatra where H5N1 killed as many as seven members of a family in May, local researchers found H5 antibodies in poultry in a nearby village but they were unable to proceed with N1 tests because of a lack of reference materials.
Neither are they equipped to find out the age of the antibodies, a test that is done in more advanced laboratories. Such a procedure would enable scientists to estimate when the animals were infected.
But officials are adamant that more must be done to identify where the disease has spread from.
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