A Hong Kong laboratory recognised by the World Health Organisation has confirmed four more human bird flu cases in Indonesia, including two deaths, a senior Indonesian Health Ministry official said today.
Hariadi Wibisono, the ministry's director of control of animal-borne diseases, said that raised Indonesia's total confirmed human bird flu cases to 23.
"There are now 23 confirmed cases in Indonesia. Of these, 16 have died," Mr Wibisono said.
Turkey and Iraq last month became the latest countries outside Asia to report human cases of the H5N1 strain of avian flu. While it mostly affects birds, bird flu has infected 161 people and killed 86 of them since 2003, according to the World Health Organization.
Wibisono said the newly confirmed Indonesian deaths were of a 22-year-old male chicken seller from Jakarta who died late last month and a 15-year-old boy who died in the West Java city of Bandung this week.
Those still alive included a 5-year-old girl from around the town of Indramayu in West Java province and a 5-year-old boy from the province of Lampung on the island of Sumatra.
The girl came from an area near where two Indonesian children from the same family died of bird flu in January, Wibisono said. The girl was unrelated to them.
The boy was an older case where initial tests had proven inconclusive, he added.
Most Indonesian cases have shown the victims had contact with dead chickens.
One of the greatest fears of experts is that the H5N1 virus will mutate to become easily passed between humans, triggering a pandemic. The current H5N1 strain of bird flu has not mutated.
The highly pathogenic strain of bird flu has affected birds in two-thirds of the provinces in Indonesia, an archipelago of about 17,000 islands and 220 million people.
The country has millions of chickens and ducks, many in the yards of rural or urban homes, making it likely that more humans will become infected with the virus.