Indonesia Confirms 14th Bird Flu Death

A 14th person has died of bird flu in Indonesia, officials said today. The announcement came as tests into the cause of an 11-year-old girl's death in Turkey continued.

Runizar Roesin, of Indonesia's bird flu information centre, said a four-year-old boy whose sister died from bird flu last week had died in the west Javanese city of Bandung on Tuesday.

Another sibling and the boy's father had been admitted to hospital with bird flu-like symptoms including fever and respiratory problems, officials said.

"We are seeing this case as a new cluster for Indonesia," Hariadi Wibisono, a health ministry official, said.

He added that blood and swab samples from all three children and the father had been sent to a World Health Organisation laboratory in Hong Kong for confirmation. So far, Indonesia has had 12 bird flu deaths confirmed by the WHO.

Meanwhile, a Turkish health ministry official said there was no evidence that an 11-year-old girl who died while being transferred from one hospital to another yesterday had had contact with fowl. Nevertheless, samples from her body were being tested for bird flu.

Elsewhere in Turkey, a four-year-old boy - one of 21 people infected with the H5N1 strain of bird flu in the country - had recovered and was being discharged from hospital. Another boy listed as critical was showing improvement, doctors and officials said.

Five-year-old Muhammet Ozcan, who lost his sister to the disease on Sunday, was among the ill people said to be improving.

He was reported as having been in a critical condition for two days, but doctors at a hospital in the eastern city of Van - near the border with Iran - today said he was getting better but still battling an infection that had spread in his lungs.

Four-year-old Selami Bas, who also tested positive for H5N1, was discharged from a hospital in the south-eastern province of Sanliurfa, the governor, Yusuf Yavascan, said today. The boy, who became ill after coming into contact with chickens, was admitted to hospital around 10 days ago.

Cristiana Salvi, a WHO official in Turkey, said she expected the situation to improve as the public information campaign about the dangers of catching the disease from poultry took effect. However, she warned it was too early to say the crisis was over. "The educational programme ... helps decrease the number of cases," she added.

Most of the cases in Turkey have involved people aged between four and 18. Officials have destroyed around 1m fowl in an attempt to limit contact with humans in a country in which most villagers raise their own chickens, turkeys and geese.

Meanwhile, officials in Hong Kong confirmed today that a dead oriental magpie robin had been infected with the H5N1 virus - the first case of the disease in the province for a year.

The robin, native to Hong Kong, was found on January 10 at a village near the border with mainland China, an Agriculture, Fisheries and Conservation official said.