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Jakarta confirms bird flu deaths

JAKARTA: Indonesia confirmed its first human deaths from bird flu on Wednesday after a man and his two daughters died, bringing Asia's toll from the disease to at least 57 persons.

Health Minister Siti Fadilah Supari told reporters that lab tests from Hong Kong showed the 38-year-old man and his two young girls, who died days apart earlier this month, had the deadly H5N1 strain of bird flu.

Though there is no evidence yet that the family from a Jakarta suburb had contact with infected poultry, Ms. Supari said human-to-human transmission of the disease appeared unlikely. The virus strain that killed them had not mutated to ease such transmission, she said. ``I don't think we have to worry about that now.''

Bird flu has swept through poultry populations in large swaths of Asia since 2003. Tens of millions of chickens have either died or been slaughtered. Bird flu has killed 38 persons in Vietnam, 12 in Thailand, four in Cambodia, and now three in Indonesia.

Experts say most of the deaths so far have resulted from an animal passing the virus to a human. But WHO has long cautioned that the virus could mutate to allow easy transmission from person to person, which could cause it to spread rapidly around the world. Dr. Georg Petersen, a WHO representative in Indonesia, said it appeared to be good news that the virus found was the H5N1 strain of bird flu, not a new form. — AP

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