Indonesia has confirmed that bird flu has killed a 23-year-old market worker.
The man, the country's 19th victim of the H5N1 avian flu virus, died on Feburary 10th in a Jakarta hospital. He had worked at a traditional market transporting chicken eggs.
The director-general of control of animal-borne disease at Indonesia's health ministry said the case brought the total number of confirmed Indonesian human cases of the H5N1 virus to 27. Eight of those who have had the disease have survived. Of Indonesia's confirmed fatalities, eight have been in 2006, making Indonesia the country with the most bird flu deaths so far this year.
Controlling the virus is a huge, if not impossible, task in Indonesia, an archipelago of about 17,000 islands and 220 million people. The government has resisted the mass culling of fowl seen in some other nations, citing the expense and the impracticality in a country where the keeping of a few chickens or ducks in backyards of homes is widely practiced in cities as well as the countryside.
Agencies have concentrated instead on selective culling, and on public education and hygiene measures aimed at prevention.
A common magpie found dead in a densely populated district in Hong Kong has tested positive for the H5N1 avian influenza virus.
It was the ninth bird to be found infected with the disease since late January in Hong Kong, and the government warned people to avoid touching wild birds or live poultry.
The government also said it was testing another common magpie for H5N1 after the bird was found dead yesterday in Mongkok, another heavily populated district that is home to a pet bird market. Magpies are common in this crowded city of nearly 7 million people and are often kept as pets.
The H5N1 virus made its first known jump to humans in Hong Kong in 1997, killing six people.
In Bulgaria, health authorities have put a man in an isolation chamber and were testing him for bird flu after two of his ducks died, but said he was not showing symptoms of the disease.
The man, from the southern Bulgarian village of Preslavtsi, has been in close contact with the dead ducks, which are being tested by veterinary authorities for the H5N1 strain .
Bulgaria detected its first outbreak of the H5N1 strain of avian flu in a wild swan on the Danube River town of Vidin, close to the Romanian border, at the end of January.