Jakarta - A 30-year-old Indonesian woman has died of bird flu, raising the country's death toll from the H5N1 avian influenza virus to 90 - the world's highest, a Health Ministry official said on Monday. The woman, identified only as ES, from Tanggerang district town in Banten province on the outskirts of the capital Jakarta, died on Saturday, three days after being treated at Jakarta's Persahabatan Hospital, said Joko Suyono, an official at the Health Ministry's bird flu information centre.
Suyono said that she fell sick on October 23 and sought medical treatment at two different health clinics nearby on October 28 before she was admitted to Usaha Insani Hospital in Tanggerang two days later.
On October 31 she was finally admitted to Persahabatan Hospital in Jakarta, which is designated to treat bird-flu patients, with a fever, cough and pneumonia. She died three days alter, Suyono added.
"Test results confirm she had been suffering from bird flu," he said, adding that the victim had had contact with dead chickens.
The woman's death was Indonesia's 90th, from a total of 112 cases of bird flu. Both figures are the highest in the world. Not counting Indonesia's latest fatality, at least 204 people have died in 12 countries in Asia and Africa of the disease, according to World Health Organization statistics.
The most common way to contract the H5N1 avian influenza virus is through contact with sick fowl. Although bird flu remains mainly an animal disease, experts fear the virus could mutate and spread from human to human, turning it into a pandemic that could kill millions of people.
