JAKARTA: A young boy died of bird flu in Indonesia on Monday, bringing the country's death toll from the virus to 56, a health ministry official said.
"We have two more confirmed cases, a two-and-a-half-year-old who died in hospital this morning, and a woman still under treatment in hospital," said I Nyoman Kandun, the ministry's director general for contagious disease control.
"There are now 74 confirmed cases, including 56 deaths," Kandun added, declining to elaborate further.
The national bird flu information center said the boy had been taken to Jakarta's Sulianti Saroso hospital from a hospital in Karawang, east of the capital, where he had been treated since November 10.
The 35-year-old woman, whose identity was not released, was also being treated in the Sulianti Saroso hospital. An official from the center said the dead boy had been in contact with poultry, but could not confirm whether this was true of the woman.
Indonesia, the world's fourth most populous nation, has the highest number of fatalities from the disease and the vast majority of cases have occurred after contact with infected poultry.
Efforts to curb the spread of the disease have been hampered by the reluctance of some poultry owners, especially backyard farmers, to hand over their sick or potentially infected birds for slaughter.
Positive results from two Indonesian laboratories are required for the World Health Organization to include the case in its records.
Scientists fear the H5N1 virus could mutate to become easily transmissible among people, which could in turn lead to a global flu pandemic with a potential death toll of millions.
