Ninth human avian flu fatality confirmed, new patients reported
The Jakarta Post, Jakarta
Minister of Health Siti Fadilah Supari has confirmed a 35 year- old man who died last month as the country's ninth human bird flu fatality.
"The World Health Organization (WHO) laboratory in Hong Kong has confirmed the test results. We now have nine confirmed bird flu deaths from a total of 14 infections," Siti said on Tuesday on the sidelines of an awards ceremony.
The latest casualty was a man identified by his initials only as AW, a resident of West Jakarta, who died on Nov. 19 at the private Pantai Indah Kapuk hospital in North Jakarta.
Doctors had initially planned to transfer AW to the avian flu treatment center at the Sulianti Saroso Hospital, but were unable to move him due to his critical condition.
The Ministry of Health's director general of disease control I Nyoman Kandun said the man had been in contact with chickens that carried the H5N1 virus.
"He was building his house and around it there were many chickens and birds running around. Researchers tested those birds and they tested positive for H5N1," Kandun said.
Meanwhile, Sulianti Saroso Hospital spokesman Ilham Patu said that five new suspected bird flu patients were admitted overnight on Monday and Tuesday from several areas of Jakarta.
"We now have a total of six patients being treated for suspected bird flu infections," Patu told AFP.
Some of the five admitted, he said, were in a worse condition than the sixth patient, a 23-year-old woman who has been in intensive care for the past few days.
Siti said over the weekend the government expected to vaccinate 47 million people who have direct contact with poultry and birds across the country against regular human influenza.
The vaccination would reduce the opportunity for H5N1 to mutate with the ordinary human flu virus and becomes easily transmissible.
The cost of the vaccination drive, however, is estimated at Rp 5 trillion (nearly US$500 million), which the state budget cannot afford.
The bird flu virus has killed 71 people in Asia since 2003, out of 138 people known to have been infected.
There has been fear that contact between infected birds and humans could eventually result in the virus mutating into a form that could easily pass between humans, sparking a pandemic that could kill millions.
The highly pathogenic H5N1 strain is endemic in poultry in parts of Asia, and has affected poultry in two-thirds of the provinces in the country.
The WHO has recommended the mass culling of poultry to effectively contain the spread of the virus, but the government said it lacked the funds to compensate farmers and bird owners.