A 16-year-old Indonesian boy has died from bird flu, according to local test results that, if confirmed, would bring Indonesia’s death toll to 43 and make it the world’s hardest-hit country.
Normally reliable tests performed at a local laboratory showed that the boy who died late on Monday had the H5N1 virus, said Dr Santoso Suroso, the director of the capital’s infectious-diseases hospital.
Grieving relatives buried Megi Supatra early on Tuesday at a family plot shaded by jackfruit trees close to his home in Bekasi, just east of Jakarta. Metres away from the cemetery, villagers were rearing chickens in coops.
”I knew about bird flu from the TV and radio, but when my son got sick I had no clue it was bird flu,” Megi’s mother, Sadiah, said after the funeral. ”I had no idea he was going to leave me.”
She said Megi was initially diagnosed as having a regular virus, and told to go home. It was only four days after symptoms appeared that bird flu was suspected, and by then it was too late, said Sadiah, wiping back tears from her eyes.
Health officials said Megi was suspected of coming into contact with sick chickens close to his home.
If confirmed by a World Health Organisation-accredited laboratory, the death will be logged as Indonesia’s 43rd from the H5N1 virus since July 2005, a third of which occurred this year.
Neighbouring Vietnam is the second-worst hit at 42, but it has not recorded any deaths in 2006.
The H5N1 virus has killed at least 135 people worldwide since it began ravaging Asian poultry stocks in late 2003, according to the World Health Organisation. That figure does not include Monday’s death in Indonesia.
Most human cases have been traced to contact with infected birds, but experts fear the virus — which remains hard for people to catch — will mutate into a form that spreads easily among people, potentially sparking a pandemic.
Experts say Indonesians will continue to die until the nation stops the rampant spread of infection among its hundreds of millions of backyard poultry.
”You’ve got to worry about the humans, but if you don’t clean up the animals, it doesn’t matter what you do,” said Dr Anthony Fauci, the United States National Institutes of Health’s infectious disease chief.
Vietnam largely controlled the spread of the virus by launching a nationwide mass vaccination campaign in poultry last year. Thailand, which has reported 16 deaths, relies on strong village-based surveillance and mass slaughtering when outbreaks are discovered.
Bird flu in Indonesia grabbed the world’s attention in May when seven members of a single family died of the virus — the largest recorded cluster to date. The World Health Organisation concluded that limited human-to-human transmission likely occurred, but the virus did not spread beyond the blood family members. — Sapa-AP
Associated Press medical writer Margie Mason contributed to this report