The World Health Organization has confirmed
an Indonesian teenager who died last week was infected with bird
flu, a Health Ministry official said on Monday, taking the country's
total deaths from the virus to 37
Nyoman Kandun, a director general at the ministry,
said the 15-year-old boy from Tasikmalaya in West Java had had contact
with poultry.
Indonesia has seen a steady rise in human infections
and deaths since its first known outbreak of H5N1 in poultry in
late 2003. It has infected 48 Indonesians so far and the country
has the second highest total bird flu deaths in the world.
Infected fowl are the usual mode of transmission
of the virus, now endemic in poultry in nearly all of Indonesia's
33 provinces.
Last week, workers culled around 1,600 chickens
in Tasikmalaya region where the boy died.
Chickens at his home and around the village where
he lived had died a few days before he fell ill. The boy's grandfather
was a chicken farmer.
Separately, authorities have sent samples from
a seven-year-old Indonesian girl who also died last week to a WHO-accredited
laboratory in Hong Kong after she tested positive for bird flu locally.
Bird flu remains
essentially an animal disease but climbing human deaths have put
many countries around the world on alert for fear it may mutate
into one that could pass easily among people and trigger a pandemic,
killing millions.
Indonesia drew international attention last month
when the virus killed as many as seven members of a single family
in North Sumatra. Experts said there could have been limited human-to-human
transmission in this cluster case.
But they stressed genetic analyses of the virus
have not shown all of the traits that are known so far to allow
it to spread easily among people.
Indonesia's government has been criticized by
some experts for what is perceived as its lack of resolve in stamping
out the H5N1 virus.
Unlike neighboring Thailand and Vietnam, which
have conducted mass culls to get rid of sources of infection, Indonesia
has only carried out selective culling and only in places where
there are known outbreaks of H5N1.
The government has cited the huge expense involved
in carrying out a mass cull in a sprawling country of 17,000 islands
where there are millions of backyard fowl.
