Jakarta- A 26-year-old woman has died of bird flu in Indonesia, bringing the country's world-leading death toll from the H5N1 avian influenza virus to 76, a health official confirmed Monday. The woman, identified only as NS and who was four months pregnant, died Sunday night at a hospital in the North Sumatra capital of Medan, said Joko Suyanto, an official at the Health Ministry's Bird Flu Information Centre.
Suyanto said the patient began showing symptoms of bird flu on May 2 and was brought on to a private hospital in Medan on May 8. She was transferred to the better-equipped Adam Malik Hospital on the next day after her condition continued to deteriorate.
"Two local tests for her came back positive for H5N1," Suyanto told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.
He said local health officials quoted the victim's husband as saying that several days before she became ill, several of their backyard chickens were founded dead. Afraid the other chickens would also die, the victim killed, cooked and consumed the remaining chickens.
Suyanto said the woman's death brings the toll in Indonesia to 76 deaths from 96 human cases, including 19 people this year.
Alarmed by a sudden spike in bird flu deaths in January after several weeks without one, the Indonesian government declared a ban on backyard poultry farms in residential areas of nine provinces.
The government also placed tight restrictions on the movement and sale of poultry and poultry products across the nine provinces, and is preparing more hospitals to treat human cases of the virus.
Most bird flu victims around the world have had direct or indirect contact with sick birds, but scientists fear the virus could mutate into a form that is easily transmissible among humans, sparking a global pandemic that could kill millions.
However, Indonesia since March has refused to share human bird flu samples with the World Health Organisation (WHO) after an Australian company developed a vaccine for commercial sale using an Indonesian sample without Jakarta's knowledge.
The government says foreign drug manufacturers are developing commercial bird flu vaccines using samples from poor countries such as Indonesia that ultimately may be unable to afford or even access them.
Indonesia has called for changes in WHO rules that would prevent samples from being used to develop vaccines unless all countries can access the scientific information without fear of patents or copyrights - and will continue its ban on sharing samples until that happens.
The issue is expected to be high on the agenda of the WHO's annual World Health Assembly, which begins Monday in Geneva. dpa sh jc jh
140627 GMT Mai 07
