Battling a Virus and Disbelief

Indonesian and WHO investigators discovered that many residents in Kubu Sembilang were unwilling to share information or give blood samples that could reveal how widely the virus was circulating. Many villagers believed that claims of bird flu were a lie. Some even threatened the investigators. When a team of officers first arrived from the provincial health department, they were warned by their local counterparts that it was too dangerous to enter the village.

"We chased them away," said Hendra Tarigan, whose wife, one of the Ginting siblings, died. "Each time they came back, we gave them no information. We just told them to leave."

Despite a concerted effort to collect blood specimens, investigators were able to take samples from only two people in the village, including the local midwife, said Diana Ginting, chief of the district health department, who shares a common surname in the region.

Indonesian health officials working with an international team returned day after day to the village and made grudging progress. They recruited 20 local volunteers to monitor fellow residents for fever and set up a temporary health post on the soccer field offering free medical care. The investigators methodically pieced together the chronology of the outbreak. They traced those who had contact with the victims and provided them with Tamiflu.

But many of those closest to the Gintings refused to take it, according to interviews with villagers in Kubu Sembilang and nearby Jandi Meriah.

"The doctors gave us Tamiflu, but we didn't take it," said Mamajus Boru Karo, 38, a relative of the Gintings, scrunching up her face as she retrieved the unpleasant memory. "We should we take it? We don't have bird flu."

'I Was Losing Hope'

At the hospital in the provincial capital, Medan, members of the Ginting family were proving uncooperative. More than a dozen relatives had come down from the mountains. They had been sent there by a smaller clinic, and they remained unconvinced that bird flu was what ailed them.

They initially balked at taking Tamiflu or receiving injections of antibiotics, doctors said.

"They tried to refuse all treatment," said Nur Rasyid Lubis, the hospital's deputy director. "We could treat them only because their condition made it impossible for them to resist. But if they had been healthy enough to walk, they all would have run away."

Jones, the youngest sibling, did just that.

"I was losing hope. I thought I was going to die," he said in a raspy voice, his stare blank beneath thick eyebrows and his cheeks sunken. He had once been a young tough, but his arms and legs, covered with elaborate swirling tattoos of red and green, had grown scrawny after more than two months of battling the disease.

Jones Ginting fled the hospital, moving around Medan and the Sumatran highlands despite his fever and increasing difficulty breathing. He returned after villagers told him that the police were looking for him and might arrest him.