By DPA
Jakarta : The death of a 24-year-old woman here has brought Indonesia’s death toll from bird flu to 94, the world’s highest, Health Ministry officials said Wednesday.
The woman, identified only by her initials, DF, was from the West Jakarta suburb of Kalideres and died Tuesday, said Joko Suyono, an official at the ministry’s bird-flu information centre.
Suyono said the woman fell sick Dec 14 and sought medical treatment five days later at Cengkareng hospital in West Jakarta, where she later died.
“Test results confirm she had been suffering from bird flu,” Suyono said, adding that investigators were still trying to determine how the woman was exposed to the virus.
Another health official said that a week before the woman become sick, she bought a chicken from a nearby market.
Her death was Indonesia’s 94th out of 116 diagnosed cases of H5N1, the strain of bird flu that can be deadly in humans. Both figures are the highest in the world.
Before the latest death in Indonesia, the World Health Organisation had confirmed at least 209 deaths in 11 countries in Asia and Africa.
The most common way to contract the H5N1 virus is through contact with infected fowl. Although bird flu remains mainly an animal disease, experts fear the virus could mutate into a form that could spread from human to human, turning into a pandemic that could kill millions of people.