Indonesian child tests positive for bird flu

JAKARTA (Reuters) - An Indonesian child has tested positive for bird flu, pushing the country's total confirmed human cases to 130, a health ministry official said on Monday.

Lily Sulistyowati, the ministry's spokeswoman, said the 22-month-old girl from Sumatra's Bukit Tinggi fell sick on March 19 and the ministry is checking her neighborhood for possible backyard farming.

"Her condition is improving, and she is being treated at a Padang hospital," Sulistyowati told Reuters by telephone.

Contact with sick fowl is the most common way of contracting H5N1 virus, which is endemic in bird populations in most of Indonesia.

Indonesia has had 105 human deaths from the bird flu virus, the highest number in the world.

Experts say the danger is the virus may evolve into a form that people can easily catch and pass to one another, in which case the transmission rate would soar, causing a pandemic in which millions of people could die.

(Reporting by Mita Valina Liem; Editing by Sugita Katyal and Valerie Lee)