The Indonesian government said on Monday that it is launching an innovative program which allows the public to report disease outbreaks to authorities in Jakarta using mobile phone text messaging, or SMS. Mobile phone ownership in Indonesia has risen sharply in recent years. The Indonesian Health Ministry faces public health threats from a number of directions at once. Indonesia is coping with the ever present threat of an outbreak of avian flu on top of dealing with recent outbreaks of polio and dengue fever linked to last year's Tsunami.
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