Indonesian girl tests positive for bird flu
JAKARTA, Feb 13 (Reuters) - A 14-year-old girl from West Jakarta has tested positive for bird flu, pushing the country's total for confirmed human cases to 127, a health ministry official said on Wednesday.
Lily Sulistyowati, the ministry's spokeswoman, said the teenager started to become sick a week after visiting her grandmother, who sells poultry.
"Some of the chickens and water fowl at her grandmother's house died suddenly, but her grandmother is fine," Sulistyowati told Reuters.
Sulistyowati said many Indonesians who earn a living by selling fowl often ignore government regulations banning people from keeping them at home or in their backyards.
Indonesia has a poultry population of 1.2 billion a year, including 285 million chickens kept by families in their backyards. These backyard chickens are a common feature of rural life in Indonesia, but have hampered efforts to curb bird flu.
Indonesia has had 103 deaths from bird flu, the highest of any nation in the world.
Contact with sick fowl is the most common way of contracting bird flu, endemic in bird populations in most of Indonesia.
Although bird flu remains an animal disease, experts fear the H5N1 virus could mutate into a form easily passed from human to human, possibly killing millions of people. (Reporting by Mita Valina Liem; Editing by David Fogarty)
