Two Indonesian women die of bird flu, cluster feared
Source: Reuters
(Adds cluster case, details, background) By Telly Nathalia JAKARTA, Jan 13 (Reuters) - Two Indonesian women have died of bird flu, a health ministry official said on Saturday, taking the overall human death toll from the disease in the country to 61 amid a spike of new cases. A 27-year-old woman from south Jakarta died after entering Persahabatan Hospital in the capital on Thursday for treatment, Muhammad Nadirin of the health ministry's bird flu information centre said. She died on Friday evening. Asked whether the woman had been in contact with sick fowl, he said: "A week before she got sick, there had been dead chickens near her home." The second death was of a 22-year-old woman from Tangerang west of Jakarta, who died in the early hours of Saturday, the official said. Separately, an 18-year-old man being treated in hospital was confirmed to have bird flu after his mother died of the disease on Thursday, marking a cluster case, another official said. The husband and son of the 37-year-old woman, from Serpong in west Java, were being treated for symptoms of bird flu at Persahabatan Hospital. Joko Suyono, another official at the bird flu information centre, said that the son had tested positive for bird flu. It was not clear whether he had been in contact with sick birds, the official said. There were no immediate test results on whether the father also had the virus, but Nyoman Kandun, director general of communicable disease control at the health ministry, said the positive test of the son signalled a cluster case. The official said, however, there was no evidence of human-to-human transmission of the virus so far in this case. The largest known cluster of human bird flu cases worldwide occurred in May 2006 in the Karo district of North Sumatra province, where as many as seven people in an extended family died. The cluster triggered fears the virus had mutated into a form that could spread easily between people. ENDEMIC Bird flu is endemic in around half of Indonesia's 33 provinces and the vast, developing country has struggled to contain the disease. The latest cases bring the total number of human deaths in Indonesia to 61, the highest number in the world. Millions of backyard chickens live in close proximity to humans and health education campaigns have often been patchy and rules difficult to enforce with the country's power structure increasingly devolved to the provinces. Indonesian officials have, however, defended their efforts to tackle the disease. "Aside from the latest cases, we have had some major improvement in fighting the disease but the danger is still there and the nature of this virus is random," Bayu Krisnamurthi, head of the national commission on avian influenza said. He said people were more vulnerable to the virus during the rainy season but hoped the latest cases did not indicate a trend.
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