Indonesia reports 47th death from bird flu
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A 14-year-old Indonesian girl who died in June was infected with bird flu, health officials said on Thursday.
The case took a long time to identify because it was from blood samples taken during routine surveillance of people with mild influenza symptoms.
Health Minister Siti Fadilah Supari said tests on the girl’s blood sample were completed late on Wednesday.
“It turned out positive,” Supari told reporters, adding chickens had died in the neighbourhood where she lived in Makassar, the capital of South Sulawesi province.
Makassar is 1,400 km (870 miles) northeast of the capital Jakarta.
The fatality takes Indonesia’s confirmed death toll from bird flu to 47, the highest in the world.
I Nyoman Kandun, director for disease control at the health ministry, said tests by two independent laboratories on the blood sample had confirmed the girl had the disease.
“The case should have been included on the list,” he told Reuters, referring to the list of human fatalities from bird flu.
“When we found one of them was positive, we traced it and found that the girl had died,” he said.
Indonesia has been criticised for not doing enough to combat the disease, which is endemic in birds in most of the country’s 33 provinces.
The government has so far refused to conduct mass culling of poultry, citing the expense and logistical difficulties in capturing and killing millions of backyard fowl.
The agriculture ministry said this week it would begin vaccinating about 300 million poultry next month against bird flu, with 60 million poultry targeted in the three months to December.
A nationwide campaign to improve public awareness was also launched last week as officials warned that the threat from the disease was likely to increase when the wet season starts in October.
Although bird flu remains essentially an animal disease, experts fear it could mutate into a form that can pass easily among humans, possibly killing millions.
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