A 17-year-old Indonesian girl has died of bird flu in, the second teenage fatality from the disease this week.
Tests by two local laboratories showed the girl was infected with the H5N1 virus, making her Indonesia's 44th confirmed bird flu death.
The girl, from North Jakarta, died yesterday. She had been in contact with sick and dead fowl, the usual mode of transmission of the virus that is endemic in poultry in nearly all provinces.
"At first, she was considered to be suffering from typhoid. But on August 7, doctors suspected she was suffering from bird flu. A day later, her condition worsened and she died," said Runizar Ruesin, head of the health ministry's bird flu information centre.
Indonesian authorities will send the girl's swab samples to the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, USA for further tests.
However, according to the World Health Organisation, if two independent local laboratories return positive results from human samples, then the case is considered definitive.
The girl's death came hours after the death of a 16-year-old boy from the outskirts of Jakarta, who the World Health Organisation confirmed was the country's 43rd human death from bird flu.
Indonesia now the highest number of human bird flu deaths, with the majority of cases since the start of this year.
In Vietnam, where 42 people have died, there have been no reported infections in people this year after the government imposed sweeping vaccination programmes for birds.
Indonesia's latest deaths come as China confirmed yesterday that the country's first human case of the H5N1 bird flu virus was in late 2003, two years earlier than originally reported.
