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JAKARTA, Sep 27 (Reuters) More than 1,350 birds have been slaughtered this week near homes of the latest Indonesian bird flu victims, a nine-year-old from Jakarta and an 11-year-old from East Java, officials said today.

Both boys died this month after contact with sick or dead fowl, pushing Indonesia's bird flu death toll to 51, the highest of any affected nation.

The government has faced criticism for not doing enough to combat the disease, endemic in birds in almost all provinces in the archipelago of 17,000 islands.

Unlike other bird flu-affected nations such as Thailand, culling poultry is not easy in Indonesia because of fierce opposition from farmers and the logistical difficulties in dealing with millions of backyard fowl.

Farmers oppose culling because of the low compensation they get for their birds. A full-grown chicken costs 35,000 rupiah ($3.80) in Jakarta, but the government only offers between 10,000 and 12,500 rupiah for each culled fowl.

In South Jakarta, officials killed about 850 chickens, ducks and pet birds near the nine-year-old boy's house on Monday and yesterday.

''The fowl were slaughtered and burnt. Those which could not be caught were shot on the spot. Residents wanted this culling to be done,'' Eko Henry Wicaksono, a senior official at the South Jakarta animal husbandry office, told Reuters.

The national team dealing with bird flu said in a statement that officials in the East Java victim's hometown of Tulungagung had culled more than 500 chickens to contain the virus.

The statement also said specimens from relatives of both boys had been taken for further testing. Indonesian health officials are also investigating a possible cluster case after a man died and his brother and sister were hospitalised. There has been no definitive conclusion on the man's death but the surviving brother has bird flu.

A preliminary test on their sister was negative for avian influenza but more testing still needed to be done before reaching a conclusive result, Hadi Yusuf, head of the bird flu ward in West Java's Hasan Sadikin hospital, told Reuters.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), 146 of the 249 people confirmed infected with the H5N1 bird flu virus worldwide have died since 2003.

The virus mainly affects birds but experts fear it could mutate into a strain capable of killing millions of people in a global pandemic.

This fear heightened in May when seven people in an extended family died of bird flu in Indonesia's North Sumatra province.

The WHO has said limited human-to-human transmission is highly likely to have occurred in the Sumatra cases but that the transmission was not sustainable and occurred only during close, prolonged contact, such as a parent looking after an infected child.

REUTERS AB KN1614