Indonesian teenager dies of bird flu

JAKARTA, June 1 (Reuters) An Indonesian girl from Central Java has died of bird flu, a health ministry official said today.

The girl, 15, from the Kendal area near the city of Semarang, died on Tuesday, Muhammad Nadirin of the ministry's bird flu centre said by telephone.

''She was handling a dead chicken which she was preparing to cook,'' the official said.

The girl's death takes the human death toll from the H5N1 virus to 79 in Indonesia, the highest in the world. There have been 99 human cases of the disease in the Southeast Asian country.

Including the latest death, there have been 188 deaths globally and 310 known infections in total, according to data from the World Health Organisation.

Contact with sick fowl is the most common way humans become infected with bird flu.

The disease is endemic in bird populations in most parts of Indonesia, where millions of backyard fowl are kept in close proximity to humans and where education campaigns often do not reach more remote areas.

For the moment, it remains largely a disease in birds but scientists are worried about the virus's persistence and ability to adapt to new environments and hosts.

Scientists say H5N1 is a global threat because the virus could mutate into form that passes easily between people, triggering a pandemic in which millions could die.

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