During a three-day meeting of international experts in Jakarta, Indonesia officials have admitted that the country lacks the manpower and money to battle the H5N1 virus following a series of natural disasters.
According to Indonesia's national bird flu coordinator, Bayu Krishnamurthi, the country has limited human, financial and institutional resources and needs more help.
Indonesia is apparently still struggling to cope with the financial consequences of the 2004 tsunami and the earthquake in May and has little money to deal the H5N1 threat.
It is appealing for $50 million, spread over three years, to set up a system to combat bird flu in farmed and backyard poultry.
While the Indonesian government has pledged $59 million for this year to deal with bird flu many say as much as $900 million is needed.
Krishnamurthi says the $50 million will help establish better surveillance as well as a more coordinated and effective rapid response system, but the country is overwhelmed with adverse events.
Indonesia has recorded the world's highest number of human bird flu cases this year, and 39 of those infected have died.
Bird flu has killed at least 130 people worldwide since it re-emerged in Asian poultry in 2003.
Of Indonesia's large population of 220 million, many live on the thousands of islands and public awareness campaigns are difficult to deploy.
A large proportion of the population depends on backyard poultry for survival and requesting poor people destroy their chickens is seen as a threat to survival by millions of Indonesians.
In the largest cluster of infections seen so far eight family members died from bird flu in Sumatra and it is more than likely the family infected each other as they shared a very small room.
Keiji Fukuda, WHO's coordinator for the Global Influenza Program in Geneva, says the case resembles other family clusters where limited human-to-human transmission occurred following close contact.