Indonesian woman with bird flu dies
Pastor Dale Morgan
Sunday February 11, 3:47 PM Reuters*
Indonesian woman with bird flu dies*
JAKARTA (Reuters) - A 20-year-old woman from West Java who tested
positive for bird flu died on Sunday, a health official said.
Her death takes Indonesia's overall toll to 64 fatalities, the highest
of any nation in the world.
I Nyoman Kandun, director general of communicable disease control at the
health ministry, told Reuters that the woman, Elis, had been confirmed
to have the H5N1 bird flu virus.
"...the result is from two labs," he said.
The woman had been taken to a hospital in Garut in West Java on Friday
after showing bird flu-like symptoms.
Muhammad Nadirin of the health ministry's bird flu centre told Reuters
the woman was reported to have had contact with a dead chicken but this
was still being investigated.
Most human cases of the bird flu virus, which has killed at least 167
people worldwide since 2003, have involved contact with infected fowl.
After something of a lull last year, concern has grown since the virus
flared again in Asia in recent months, spreading through poultry flocks
in South Korea, Japan, Thailand and Vietnam. And Indonesia, where many
people keep chickens in their yards, has reported a number of new human
cases.
The virus is endemic in poultry in many provinces in the country of
17,000 islands, where limited health care facilities and poor
communications and transportation infrastructure add to the problems of
dealing with the virus.
Indonesia's government has come under fire in recent days for stopping
the sharing of samples of the highly pathogenic HN51 strain of the virus.
Jakarta argues the prevailing system allows drug firms to use these
samples to make vaccines developing countries often cannot afford.