Indonesia blames bird flu for toddler's death
By Ade Rina
The Star, 20 Jan 2006

JAKARTA (Reuters) - An Indonesian toddler who died this week has tested positive for bird flu, officials said on Thursday, a day after wealthy nations promised almost $2 billion to tackle the spread of the lethal virus. 

The boy's 13-year-old sister died last week after being infected with the H5N1 avian flu virus, according to local tests. Both cases still need to be confirmed by outside laboratories recognised by the World Health Organisation (WHO). 

Wealthy nations pledged $1.9 billion to fight bird flu at a conference in Beijing on Wednesday. The money will be spent on measures to detect and eradicate a virus which is endemic in poultry in parts of Asia. 

As experts weigh how to allocate the funding, the human toll from the virus is ticking higher. 

A 35-year-old woman poultry culler from the Chinese province of Sichuan who died last week was a victim of bird flu, the WHO said on Thursday, taking the human death toll from the virus to at least 80 since it reemerged in late 2003. 

The latest victims appear to match the pattern of infection being passed to people through contact with sick birds. 

Experts fear the H5N1 virus could mutate enough to pass easily between humans, setting off a pandemic that might kill millions of people and cripple the global economy. 

Turkey has reported at least four deaths from the virus this month, bringing it to the gates of Europe and the Middle East. 

Neighbouring Iraq sent experts to the Kurdish region in the north of the country to search for signs of bird flu after the death of a teenage girl from a fever this week caused panic. 

However, the WHO in Geneva said bird flu had been ruled out as the cause of her death. 

Turkey fears its rapidly expanding tourist industry will suffer if it does not stamp out the virus quickly. 

"Bird flu is like rubbing salt into the wounds. There have not been cancellations but there is a slowdown

in bookings," Oktay Varlier, head of Turkey's Tourism Investors' Association, said on Thursday. 

Europe should set up a task force that can be rapidly deployed to fight the virus, a leading scientist said. 

"I think we should form a European influenza task force that brings together all our knowledge, so that if you have outbreaks in the future you could form delegations to work together with local experts in the area where it occurs," Dr Albert Osterhaus told Reuters during a conference in London. 

The task force would include a network of laboratories and bring together virologists, doctors, epidemiologists and experts in agriculture and human and animal health, added Osterhaus, a virologist at the Erasmus Medical Centre in the Netherlands. (Reporting by Ade Rina in Jakarta, Humeyra Pamuk and Selcuk Gokoluk in Ankara, Mariam Karouny in Baghdad and Pat Reaney in London)