Indonesia struggles as death toll from bird flu reaches 42

The death of a 44-year-old man four days ago from bird flu has put Indonesia on a par with Vietnam when it comes to confirmed human deaths from the deadly virus.

The man's death takes the death toll in Indonesia to 42, the highest number of cases reported anywhere in the world.

According to Nyoman Kandun, director general of communicable disease control at the Health Ministry, a local test has proven positive and they are now waiting for confirmation of the diagnosis by a laboratory sanctioned by the World Health Organization (WHO).

The man from East Jakarta died on July 12 and had apparently been contact with a dead chicken in his neighborhood.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta has also confirmed the death on July 14 of a 3-year-old Indonesian girl, was from bird flu which made her the country's 41st victim of the virus.

Again the infection was traced back to infected chickens in a neighbor's yard.

Indonesia is a sprawling archipelago where the virus is endemic in poultry in almost all of the country's 33 provinces and a senior government official recently declared that Indonesia's poultry death rate from bird flu was worsening, because of poor vaccination coverage.

The Indonesian government has been reluctant to impose mass poultry culling, due to a lack of funds and the impracticality of such a program in a country with millions of backyard fowl and has opted instead for vaccination to prevent the spread of bird flu among poultry.

Bird flu remains essentially a disease of animals and can only be contacted by close contact with sick or dead poultry.

The WHO estimates that the H5N1 virus has to date killed 132 humans worldwide and millions of birds, and though there have as yet been no mutations in the virus, world health experts are concerned that human-to-human transmission is still a possibility and could trigger a global pandemic.

When seven members of the same family in North Sumatra died from the virus alarm bells were initially set off but experts have since said that though there could have been limited human-to-human transmission it only affected blood relatives and did not spread beyond the family.

Scientists have since said that multiple mutations had been found in the H5N1 virus that killed the Sumatran family but they are unsure of their significance.