Indonesian teenager tests positive for bird flu

JAKARTA, Aug 12 (Reuters) An Indonesian teenager has tested positive for bird flu according to local tests and is being treated in hospital, a senior health ministry official said today.

It was not clear if the 17-year-old youth from West Java had contact with sick fowl, the usual mode of transmission of the H5N1 bird flu virus that is endemic in poultry in nearly all of Indonesia's provinces.

The teenager had a fever and breathlessness, some of the symptoms of avian influenza that has killed 44 people in Indonesia since last year. Most of the human cases have occurred this year and Indonesia now has the world's highest death toll.

''We have one more positive case of avian influenza. This is the result from a health ministry laboratory and NAMRU,'' said another official, Nyoman Kandun, the health ministry's director-general of disease control, referring to the U.S.

Naval Medical Research Unit based in Jakarta.

The teenager's swab samples will only be sent to a World Health Organisation-accredited laboratory if the health ministry thinks the specimens need further testing.

According to the WHO, if two independent local laboratories return positive results from human samples, then the case is considered definitive.

In Vietnam, where 42 people have died, there have been no reported infections in people this year after the government imposed sweeping vaccination programmes for birds.

Indonesia has been criticised for not doing enough to stamp out H5N1, which still remains essentially an animal disease but experts fear could spark a pandemic if it mutates into a form that can pass easily among people.

Unlike Vietnam, which has conducted mass culls to get rid of sources of infection, Indonesia has only carried out selective culling and only in places where there are known outbreaks of H5N1.

REUTERS AB HT1604