Spreading like wild fire, the extremely infectious H5N1 virus has engulfed one more life in the most affected Asian country, Indonesia, lifting this season’s human death toll in the country to five and overall toll to 62.
The recent victim of the deadly virus was a 19-year-old woman, Titin, from a village in West Java province who died on Friday after undergoing a three day treatment, Dr. Muhammad Nadirin at the national health ministry's bird flu centre, reported.
"She was sick since Jan. 11, got a high temperature and cough and then entered Garut hospital on Jan. 17," he said. "Six days before she got sick she had contact with a sick chicken that, according to the agriculture department's rapid test, was also positive for bird flu."
The woman's death is the fifth fatality in the country since Jan. 9. Before that, a 37-year-old woman from Banten Province on Java Island, a 14-year-old Indonesian boy on the outskirts of Jakarta, a 27-year-old woman from south Jakarta and a 22-year-old woman from the industrial town of Tangerang near Jakarta had died due to the avian flu virus.
Before the fresh five fatalities, Indonesia had not recorded any cases for six weeks, a calm interval that led some Indonesian officials to assume that they are succeeded in beating the disease. The country has reported total 80 bird flu cases so far of which 62, including the fresh death, are reported died.
Concerned with the sudden spike in bird flu deaths, the Indonesian government has declared a ban on backyard poultry farms in residential areas to nine provinces.
The ban, which until now has been imposed only on the national capital Jakarta, West Java and Banten provinces, now extends across Java, the world's most densely-populated island, and beyond, as the most human bird flu cases have resulted from contact with infected fowl, the government officials reported.
A new campaign, Indonesia has started this week to make the capital free of such fowl, raised controversy among residents. While some embraced the country’s plan to cull the birds amid health concerns, others worried about losing a key source of income.
Indonesia, the world's fourth-most-populous country and one that stretches across 17,000 islands in an archipelago as wide as the continental United States, has been criticized by the anti bird flu agencies for showing less efforts to check the H5N1 when it first appeared in poultry stocks and among backyard chickens in 2004.
Meanwhile, an Egyptian woman died from bird flu on Friday after six days in hospital, raising the human death toll in Egypt to 11. The figure is the largest outside Asia.
The 27-year-old woman, Warda Eid Ahmed from Beni Suef province, south of Cairo, was locomoted to hospital in the capital on January 13 with the symptoms of pneumonia.
The H5N1 bird flu virus has killed at least 164 people around the world, so far, including 62 in Indonesia, and 11 in Egypt. It has infected nearly 260 people worldwide since late 2003, and WHO fears that millions could die if the virus were to mutate into a form that passes easily from person to person.
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