An Islamic boarding school in Tangerang may have breached health regulations when it sent hundreds of its sick students home after they were quarantined on suspicion of having contracted the H1N1 virus.
An official at the Tangerang Health Agency said Wednesday the decision by the authorities at the Dar-Al Qolam Islamic boarding school to return the sick students to their parents had risked spreading the potential H1N1 strain further.
"By returning the sick students to their parents, the school has disrupted our procedures for handling a possible epidemic," Yuli Sunar Dewanti, the head of communicable disease prevention and environmental sanitation at the agency, told The Jakarta Post.
The boarding school could be charged with violating regulations on the containment of diseases, she said, because by placing the sick children in the vicinity of others, the chance of the virus spreading was increased dramatically.
"It seems that the school authorities do not understand the law on health and the law on endemic diseases. Their uncooperative attitude has also disturbed our procedures," she said. The agency had quarantined the sick students in an attempt to prevent direct contact with outsiders.
Last week, the boarding school began to return sick students who were quarantined by the agency to their parents, who live in many regions across the country, without any clear reason.
Abdul Aziz, the director for student affairs at the boarding school, said the school was simply following its own regulations.
"We have our own regulations, which have been applied since the boarding school was founded in 1968," Abdul told journalists Wednesday.
He said if students were ill, doctors at the school clinic would treat them. If however after two days they showed no sign of recovery, the school would contact the student's parents and ask them to pick up their children.
"That is our regulation and it also applies to the hundreds of students who fell ill with a fever last week. We sent them home to their parents," he said.
Aziz refused to confirm or deny Wednesday that students at the boarding school had been infected with the H1N1 virus because he had not received laboratory test results from the Tangerang Health Agency.
Saiful Bukhori, the secretary at the boarding school, said des-pite speculation from agency officials, the school had not sent the students home because they were suspected to be infected with the H1N1 virus.
"We need written evidence from the laboratory test results *to prove the students are infected*, not just provoking statements, which simply lead to panic among our students and their parents," he said.
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