Local tests show Indonesian boy dies of bird flu

JAKARTA, June 16 (Reuters) A 14-year-old Indonesian boy who died this week has tested positive for bird flu, a Health Ministry official said today, citing local tests.

If confirmed by a World Health Organisation laboratory, the boy from south Jakarta will be the 39th bird flu death in Indonesia, a sprawling archipelago where the virus has killed millions of fowl.

Samples of the boy's lung fluid have been sent to a WHO laboratory in Hong Kong for confirmation, Nyoman Kandun, a director general at the ministry, told a news conference. Local tests are not considered definitive.

Kandun said the boy had had contact with sick poultry, the usual mode of transmission of the disease.

''The boy was admitted to the hospital on June 14 after suffering from flu-like symptoms and he died on the same day,'' he said.

Indonesia has seen a steady rise in its number of human infections and deaths since its first known outbreak of H5N1 in poultry in late 2003.

Bird flu remains essentially an animal disease but climbing human deaths have put many countries around the world on alert for fear it may mutate into one that could pass easily among people and trigger a pandemic, killing millions.

Indonesia drew international intention last month when the virus killed as many as seven members of a single family in north Sumatra. Experts said there could have been limited human-to-human transmission in this cluster case.

But they stressed genetic analyses of the virus has not shown all of the traits that are known so far to allow it to spread easily among people.

Minister of Health Siti Fadillah Supari, who also addressed the news conference, said the bird flu situation in Indonesia is serious and the challenge is to prevent infection from animals to humans.

''The most difficult is how to make people let their poultry be culled for the sake of others,'' she said.

The bird flu virus is endemic in poultry in nearly all of the country's 33 provinces.

Despite climbing deaths, the government has resisted mass culling of birds, citing the expense and impracticality in a country dotted with countless backyard farms.

REUTERS SB RK1650