800 Thousand Doses Of PMK Vaccine Have Arrived, Directly Distributed To Regions

Photo via Antara

JAKARTA - There are 800,000 doses of the oral and nail disease (PMK) vaccine that just arrived at Soekarno-Hatta Airport, Tangerang, Banten, early Friday morning. Everything will be directly distributed to various regions as an effort to accelerate the handling of the PMK outbreak.

"Today we received 800,000 doses and starting tomorrow we can deliver. And we have confirmed that 3 million doses can arrive in Indonesia, gradually, of course," said Agriculture Minister Syahrul Yasin Limpo in his statement, Friday, June 17.

The Minister of Agriculture hopes that the vaccine can be swiftly welcomed through good cooperation by local governments, crisis centers, and task forces in districts and provinces. so as to be able to prepare for the injection as well as perform treatment optimally.

"I hope that the task force in the district, the crisis center in the district or province, and nationally have prepared themselves to inject vaccines," the minister said as quoted by Antara.

Vaccine distribution will be carried out in previously mapped FMD outbreak areas. The Ministry of Agriculture has categorized livestock which are prioritized to get the PMK vaccine.

Vaccine injection will be prioritized for healthy animals that are in the red and yellow zones. In addition, the FMD vaccine is also prioritized for livestock located in the breeding source area, as well as for livestock located in the dairy farming center area.

So far, said the Minister of Agriculture, the highest spread of PMK is still in the area of animal traffic both by land and sea.

"Animal traffic is one of the sources of epidemic carriers, therefore we hope that animal traffic will travel by sea, land and air through quarantine checks. We hope that on land also the same, of course because there are many rat roads that become its a challenge," he said.

According to the Minister of Agriculture, the spread of the FMD outbreak was very fast with the transmission of the virus through the air or airborne. Therefore, the Minister of Agriculture asked all officers in the field to really control the presence of humans as well as the entry and exit of livestock.

"This epidemic has an extraordinary acceleration, therefore extraordinary efforts are stronger, being part of the existing answers. Hopefully this can make us all confident that the FMD outbreak can be handled optimally well," he said.