 |
||
|
Bird flu
probe widens |
||
|
JAKARTA: Health authorities in Indonesia widened an investigation into a potential bird flu cluster in West Java to include nine people, five of whom have already died, yesterday. Forty-five people have already died of the H5N1 strain of bird flu in Indonesia, making the archipelago the world’s hardest hit by the virus, with outbreaks showing no sign of slowing down. The nine in the potential cluster come from remote Cikelet, a group of villages in West Java’s Garut district. Two of the nine have been confirmed as contracting bird flu. One died and another has since recovered. Of the four others dead, three were not tested for the virus. “There is no proof so far (of a cluster case), but we’re still continuing our investigations”, Runizar Roesin of the bird flu information centre said. |
An expert team from the health ministry and the World Health Organization (WHO) was sent to the area on Thursday to check whether human-to-human transmission of the virus had occurred. Cluster cases heighten the chance of the virus mutating to become easily transmissible between humans. Scientists fear this could spark a global flu pandemic, with the potential to kill millions. Three suspected cases have been hospitalized in the provincial capital of Bandung, Roesin said. He added that four as yet unconfirmed deaths occurred over the past month --- most recently a 35-year-old woman on Thursday. Roesin said that most of the nine came from four villages, which were only 1km to 2km apart in an area difficult to reach by road, and had little awareness about the deadly virus, or how it was spread. |
He said, however, that health officials were trying to educate Cikelet residents about how to avoid contracting the deadly H5N1 virus. The WHO has said that recent reports of poultry dying in the area increased the likelihood that the infections were spread by birds rather than between humans. The UN’s food organization warned this week that bird flu was now endemic in parts of Asia. --- AFP
|
|
|
||
|
|
||
