A 13-year-old Indonesian girl died of bird flu at the weekend, and two of her siblings have tested positive for the H5N1 virus, a health ministry official said today.
"We found three positive bird flu cases in one family coming from Indramayu, West Java," said the ministry's director of control of animal-borne diseases. He said this was Indonesia's fifth cluster of bird flu cases, where people living in close proximity had fallen ill.
There was no evidence of human-to-human transmission, and dead chickens had been found in the neighbourhood, he added.
The H5N1 virus is not known to pass easily between humans at the moment, but experts fear it could develop that ability and set off a global pandemic that might kill millions of people.
If confirmed by outside laboratories recognised by the World Health Organization (WHO), the latest cases would take total known deaths in Indonesia from avian flu to 13 and the number who have had bird flu to 20.
Officials said the girl died in an Indramayu hospital while her 15-year-old sister and three-year-old brother had been sent to a hospital in Jakarta designated to care for bird flu patients. Indramayu is 175 kilometres east of Jakarta.
"A lot of fowls died around the neighbourhood where they lived. But we don't know yet whether these fowls were carrying the virus. We sent a team there to investigate this morning," an official said.
The highly pathogenic strain of bird flu is endemic in poultry in parts of Asia and has affected birds in two-thirds of the provinces in Indonesia, an archipelago of about 17,000 islands and 220 million people.