A three-year-old boy from Indonesia's Central Java province has died of bird flu, a senior health official said today, citing the results of a local test.
If confirmed by a UN-recognised laboratory, the boy would be the country's 21st death from the H5N1 virus, which is now endemic in poultry in the world's fourth most populous nation.
"A local test of (the boy) who died yesterday or a day before yesterday, was positive," Hariadi Wibisono, director of control of animal-borne diseases at the national health ministry, said.
A sample of the boy's blood has been sent to a laboratory in Hong Kong recognised by the World Health Organisation for confirmation, he added. The boy had been in contact with fowl, according to initial information.
Contact with infected birds is the most common means of transmission of the H5N1 virus to humans. Bird flu has killed at least 94 people in East Asia and the Middle East since late 2003 and scientists fear the virus could mutate and spread easily from person to person, triggering a pandemic that could kill millions and cripple economies.
Of Indonesia's internationally confirmed fatalities from the H5N1 virus, nine have been in 2006, making it the country with the most bird flu deaths so far this year.
H5N1 has killed birds in more than 30 countries in the Middle East, Asia, Europe and Africa. It has spread to 14 new countries in the past month. In Indonesia, the highly pathogenic strain of bird flu has affected birds in about two-thirds of the country's provinces.
Stamping out the virus is a huge, if not impossible, task in Indonesia, a sprawling archipelago of about 17,000 islands and 220 million people. The government has resisted the mass culling of fowl seen in some other nations, citing the expense and the impracticality in a country where the keeping of a few chickens or ducks in backyards of homes is common in cities and on farms.
Agencies have concentrated instead on selective culling, and on public education and hygiene measures aimed at prevention. A sweeping door-to-door campaign to try to control the disease in Jakarta, the capital and the country's biggest city with about 12 million people, only got underway at the end of February. Agriculture officials estimate that Jakarta alone has some 500,000 fowl.