Bird flu crops up again in Indonesia

According to a senior Indonesian health official an 18-year-old shuttlecock maker from East Java is the latest victim of bird flu.

He is apparently undergoing treatment in hospital.

A sample of his blood has been sent to a Hong Kong laboratory recognised by the World Health Organisation (WHO) for further testing.

Health officials say they are trying to trace where the factory sourced the feathers.

Almost all human cases of bird flu from the H5N1 virus are believed to have been contracted from direct or indirect contact with infected poultry.

To date at least 32 people have died of bird flu in Indonesia, which has the second highest death toll after Vietnam where 42 have died; more than half of these have died this year.

It was just last week, following a cluster of infections in one family in Somatra that concern was voiced amongst experts that the virus had mutated.

One family had six confirmed deaths from the virus raising the spectre of possible human-to-human transmission which could trigger a pandemic.

Indonesian and international officials are still investigating the cause of the outbreak.

At present no other members of the North Sumatra village where the family lived are known to have been infected with bird flu, but the WHO says it has not ruled out limited human-to-human transmission in the family cluster.

Bird flu has killed 123 people worldwide since it first surfaced in 2003 and has since spread through Europe, Africa and Asia.

The majority of the deaths have been in east Asia, and all the victims caught the disease from poultry.

It seems the H5N1 virus is endemic in much of Indonesia.

Meanwhile talks at the World Health Assembly this week which are an attempt to galvanize a global response to a threatened influenza pandemic could well suffer a setback because of the sudden illness of the World Health Organization's director-general, Lee Jong-wook.

Sixty one year old Lee became ill on the weekend at an official function and was rushed to hospital and is now recovering from surgery to remove a blood clot on his brain; he will remain in hospital for several days.

Lee was scheduled to address the Assembly and will miss the annual key policy-setting meeting in Geneva to be attended by delegates from 192 countries.

One of the WHO's top items on the agenda is the strengthening of the response to a bird flu pandemic.

An avian flu pandemic would spread easily among people as natural immunity to it does not exist it is likely that the strain presently endemic amongst many bird populations would cause a more serious illness than a seasonal flu.

Many experts believe a flu pandemic is highly likely and while previous pandemics have killed no more than 3 percent of those infected, more than half those known to have contracted H5N1 influenza have died.

According to the WHO the number of deaths from H5N1 in the first five months of this year have surpassed 2005 levels as the virus spread to animals in more than 30 countries on three continents.