Indonesian teenager stays home despite bird flu

JAKARTA, Aug 14 (Reuters) An Indonesian teenager who tested positive for bird flu has refused to be hospitalised, insisting he has a common flu and not avian influenza, health officials said today.

Health authorities have been trying to persuade the 17-year-old farmer from a remote village in West Java to undergo treatment at a hospital in Bandung, but the youth has resisted, they said.

''He was hospitalised on Wednesday but on Thursday night he returned home, he did not want to be hospitalised. He has been at home until now,'' Dikdik Hendrajaya, a senior official at Garut regency, told Reuters.

Results from two local laboratories showed on Saturday that the teenager who raised chickens in his backyard had bird flu, which is endemic in poultry in nearly all the provinces of the sprawling archipelago.

''His doctor had suspected he was suffering from bird flu at the time when he was first hospitalised. But he thought he suffered from usual flu,'' said Runizar Ruesin, an official at the health ministry's bird flu crisis centre.

''He is a farmer...his parents are also farmers. He raises chickens in his backyard and so do his neighbours. Chickens suddenly died in his backyard.'' The case highlights the problems of fighting avian influenza in Indonesia, which has logged the highest number of human bird flu deaths in the world but where many are still ignorant about the disease.

Efforts to control the virus, which has killed 44 people in the sprawling archipelago, often meet with fierce resistance.

Earlier this month, when three government ministers travelled to a village in Sumatra with a suspected bird flu cluster, they were jostled by villagers angry about a planned bird culling.

At one point, locals tried to rip off the protective masks worn by the ministers, who were eventually forced to take off their white protective suits.

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 KN1409