Indonesian security guard dies of bird flu

A MAN died of bird flu in one of the affluent neighbourhoods of Indonesia’s capital, while a self-employed vendor in a remote Chinese village was sickened by the disease, authorities said yesterday.

The Philippines, which is so far free of the H5N1 strain of the virus, started stockpiling tens of thousands of capsules of the only drug known to be effective against the disease in humans.

Bird flu has ravaged poultry stocks across Asia since 2003 and jumped to humans killing at least 71, almost all of them in Vietnam and Thailand.

But the caseload in Indonesia, which is awaiting confirmation on its latest death from a WHO-affiliated laboratory in Hong Kong, is steadily rising.

Its nine confirmed human deaths have all occurred in the last six months, most of them in or near the sprawling capital of more than 10 million people.

The 39-year-old man who died earlier this week was a security guard for a foreigner in Kemang, a wealthy neighbourhood in southern Jakarta, and lived nearby.

China has mounted an aggressive campaign to fight bird flu but suffered a setback yesterday when after going 15 days without any new cases a 35-year-old man tested positive for the disease.

The self-employed man from the eastern province of Jiangxi fell ill on December 4 after a bird flu outbreak was reported in ducks in his village, the China Daily cited the Health Ministry as saying.

Some 1,640 ducks in his village and 15,000 birds in the surrounding area were destroyed to stop the outbreak, the paper said, without providing details.