New Bird Flu Death In Indonesia

Laboratory tests confirmed that a 25-year-old woman who died in the Indonesian capital overnight had bird flu, officials said Wednesday as they investigated the possibility that several members of a family in West Java were infected by the virus.

Health experts are closely watching possible "clusters" of cases within families or neighborhoods for signs of human-to-human transmission of the virus.

Dr. Ilham Patu, a spokesman for Jakarta's infectious diseases hospital, said the government was waiting for the tests on the woman, who died late Tuesday or early Wednesday, to be confirmed by a World Health Organization-accredited laboratory in Hong Kong.

That could take several days. Until then, the government will keep its bird-flu death toll at seven.

The H5N1 bird flu virus has been ravaging poultry stocks across Asia since 2003 and has jumped to humans, killing at least 68, most in Vietnam and Thailand.

In related developments:

Further tests show avian influenza was rife on a farm where a duck tested positive for the virus, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency said Wednesday. "The ability of avian influenza virus to quickly spread and amplify in such conditions is precisely why we activated pre-emptive depopulation policy as soon as the virus was first detected," said agency spokesman Mark Clarke.

The United States has relaxed a ban on poultry imports from British Columbia initially sparked by the discovery of bird flu in a duck raised in the Canadian province. The strain of bird flu is now known to be low-pathogenic and poses no threat to human health, unlike the more virulent form in Asia that has killed dozens of people, the Agriculture Department said.

This year's supply of flu vaccine will reach 80 million doses by the beginning of December — a robust supply considering the United States has never administered more than 83 million doses in a single year. Still, many health care providers complain that they can't get the vaccine, or they can't get enough to meet demand — and they're right, an official with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Tuesday.

Vietnam will continue a campaign to poison wild pigeons in an effort to contain bird flu, an official said Wednesday, despite a U.N. warning that governments should stay focused on halting the virus in poultry stocks. Authorities in southern Ho Chi Minh City this week began killing pigeons in school yards, parks and other public places to try to minimize the spread of the H5N1 bird flu virus, said Phan Xuan Thao, deputy director of the city animal health department.

Japan will cull 110,000 free-range chickens suspected of having a mild form of bird flu, officials said Saturday. The birds will be killed at a farm in Ogawa in northern Japan's Ibaraki state, where hundreds of thousands of birds have been destroyed at dozens of other farms over the past few months following bird flu outbreaks involving the H5N2 virus, which Japanese officials say has never been confirmed to infect humans.

North Korea said Monday it was strengthening quarantine measures at all points of entry to the communist state to prevent the possible spread of bird flu. North Korea has been on alert against bird flu with a spate of fresh outbreaks reported abroad, including in neighboring China. Last week, Beijing reported its first human death from the disease.