Indonesia probes possible bird flu cluster

Indonesia is investigating a possible cluster of bird flu cases after a man died and his brother and sister were hospitalized, one of them testing positive for bird flu, a doctor said on Tuesday.

The man, 25, died on Sunday with bird flu symptoms after being treated at a Christian hospital in Bandung, the capital of West Java province, said Hadi Yusuf, head of the bird flu ward at the city’s Hasan Sadikin hospital.

The dead man’s brother, 20, and sister, 15, were being treated in Hasan Sadikin hospital and tests carried out by a government laboratory showed the surviving brother had bird flu, Yusuf said.

It was not clear if samples from the dead brother had been taken for tests when he was treated, the doctor said.

“The condition of the (other) brother is not good. He’s on a ventilator,” Yusuf told Reuters by telephone.

Results for the girl were expected on Wednesday, he said.

The brothers often bought dead chickens to feed their dog, but the girl had no known history of contact with chickens, the doctor said.

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“If it is true that the youngest did not touch chickens at all and she had bird flu, we need to suspect she got it from the brothers,” he said.

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

Those infected have come from countries ranging from China to Iraq to Djibouti. Indonesia, with 51 deaths, has the highest toll of any nation.

In Thailand, a 59-year-old man died of bird flu last month, the country’s 17th victim of the virus since it swept through much of Asia in late 2003, a senior Health Ministry official said on Tuesday.

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The man died on Aug. 10 in a northeastern province near the Lao border after chickens at his house fell sick and died, the official said.

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.

Indonesia has been criticized for not doing enough to combat the disease, endemic in birds in most of the provinces in the archipelago of 17,000 islands, the world’s largest.

The United Nations bird flu coordinator, David Nabarro, said this month that Indonesia had made progress in its fight against bird flu.

But he expressed disappointment at the slow flow of funds pledged by international donors to Indonesia for the effort.

Health experts and scientists say it is crucial to control the virus from spreading in poultry to limit the chances of more people contracting the disease. The more it spreads, the greater the risks of the virus mutating into a form that can easily pass between humans.