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Indonesia
Confirms 9th Bird Flu Death |
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Meanwhile, a World Health Organization official backed Indonesia's stance that killing backyard chickens - as opposed to birds on big farms - was not a recommended way to tackle the disease. Tests from a laboratory in Hong Kong showed that a 35-year-old Indonesian man who died last month in the capital, Jakarta, had the lethal H5N1 strain of bird flu, said Hariadi Wibisono, a senior Health Ministry official. "I have just received confirmation," he said, adding that the victim, identified only by his initials A.R., had a history of contact with poultry. |
The H5N1 bird flu virus has ravaged poultry stocks across Asia since 2003 and has fatally infected at least 70 people, most of them in Vietnam and Thailand. A different variety, H5N2, has not been detected in humans, Japanese officials said. An undetermined strain of the virus has been detected among chickens at Tsukuba Farm in Ibaraki prefecture, about 65 miles north of Tokyo, officials said in a statement Tuesday. The prefecture will carry out further tests to determine the exact strain, the statement said. Hundreds of thousands of birds have been destroyed at dozens of other Ibaraki farms over the past few months after outbreaks of H5N2. Bird flu hit Japan last year for the first time in decades. There has been one confirmed human case involving the H5N1 virus but no reported human deaths. Almost all human cases of the disease have been traced to contact with infected birds. Experts fear the |
virus could mutate into a form that passes easily between people, starting a pandemic. Indonesia's cash-strapped government has come under fire for failing to carry out mass killings of poultry in infected areas - one of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization's basic recommendations for containing the virus. The WHO's director for Southeast Asia said Tuesday that, while killing birds on industrial poultry farms was an effective way to stop the disease, slaughtering backyard birds was not. Some governments cannot afford to compensate villagers for mass killings, Samlee Plianbangchang said during a brief visit to Indonesia. In other places, killing animals goes against cultural or religious beliefs. "Therefore culling is not the answer," he said.
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