Bali Records First Bird Flu Fatality

(8/14/2007)

The death of a 29-year-old woman, Ni Putu Sri Windiani, from West Bali has been formally confirmed as Indonesia's 82nd fatality attributed to the H5NI virus – more commonly known as Bird Flu.

The woman, who lived in an agricultural setting nearly 3 hours drive from Bali's capital, died on Sunday, August 12, 2007, in the Denpasar Sanglah General Hospital in a special isolation unit.

The woman's 5-year-old daughter preceded her Mother in death on August 5, 2007, after being hospitalized for two weeks in Negara with "flu-like" symptoms. While the woman's infection with the H5N1 virus has now been clinically confirmed, no tissue samples from her dnow deceased aughter exists that would permit a definitive diagnosis.

Meanwhile, a 3-year-old girl, who is a neighbor of both victims, is being treated in the isolation war of the same hospital. Doctors, however, report that the child's condition is steadily improving and tests thus far for the bird flu virus have been negative.

The Bali victims both lived in a farming village where a large number of poultry have recently died from the H5N1 virus. Doctors suspect the cases do not represent human-to-human contagion, but, instead, are attributable poor hygeine practice by people living in close proximity to an infected bird population.

Local press reports in Bali indicate that local villagers may have contributed to the latest infections by failing to properly dispose of the diseased bird and, in some instances, fedding the bird's carcasses to their swine stock.

Special teams trained to deal with bird flu are on the scene in the West Bali village where all poultry within a 1 km radius of the home of the Bali victims have been culled. Health screening and health monitoring protocols have also been introduced for villagers from the affected areas.