Indonesian girl tests positive for bird flu

JAKARTA (Reuters) - A 14-year-old girl from West Jakarta whose mother was hospitalized with bird flu last month, has also tested positive, a health ministry official said on Wednesday, bringing Indonesia's total confirmed cases to 127.

"We can say it is a cluster in a family but it is not a human-to-human case because they may have contracted the virus from the same source," said Lily Sulistyowati, the ministry's spokeswoman, adding that the mother's condition had since improved.

She said the teenager started to become sick a week after visiting her grandmother, who sells poultry. The girl's mother had also visited the grandmother.

"Some of the chickens and water fowl at her grandmother's house died suddenly, but her grandmother is fine," Sulistyowati told Reuters.

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)