Bird flu kills Indonesian woman, takes its 62nd life in Indonesia

The 19-year-old woman died on Friday after being hospitalized for three days in the West Java town of Garut, some 200 kilometers (125 miles) southeast of the capital, Jakarta, said health ministry official Nyoman Kandun.

“She had contact with dead poultry six days before hospitalized,” Kandun said.

The woman’s death is the fifth human bird flu fatality in the country since Jan. 9. Before that, Indonesia had not recorded any cases for six weeks — a lull that led some Indonesian officials to say they were succeeding in beating the disease.

The spike in cases has prompted the government to plunge into an all-out campaign to clear several provinces — with the highest number of bird flu cases — of fowl, starting on Friday with the capital, where four people had died in the past week.

“Quick and concrete actions are needed to prevent more victims,” Jakarta Governor Sutiyoso, who goes only with one name, told el-Shinta radio station on Saturday.

He gave Jakarta residents two weeks to surrender or sell their birds before officials would go door-to door confiscating fowls to rid its teeming streets of backyard chickens.

The governor also said Jakarta had plans to relocate its traditional bird markets from downtown areas, but gave no details.

Meanwhile, South Korean quarantine officials are set to slaughter 273,000 poultry after a bird flu outbreak occurred at a chicken farm in Cheonan, about 92 kilometers (57 miles) south of Seoul, said agriculture ministry official Lee Joo-won.

“We plan to start slaughtering 273,000 poultry within a 500-meter (1,650-foot) radius of the outbreak site and destroying eggs on Sunday morning,” Lee said.

It will take about three days to complete the culling, said Park Yang-soon, an official at the South Chungcheong provincial government, which controls Cheonan.

The outbreak occurred earlier this week, the fifth of such outbreak since November, Lee said.

The ministry also said it will make a decision whether to kill another 386,000 poultry on Sunday while limiting the movement of about 2.16 million chickens and ducks from 90 farms within a six-mile radius of the outbreak.

Earlier this month, South Korean officials said that the deadly H5N1 strain of the virus had been transmitted to a human during a recent outbreak among poultry, but the person showed no symptoms of the disease as the poultry farm worker developed natural immunity to the disease.

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