Thanks to the Flu Clinic for providing the link to this AFP story in the Khaleej Times: Indonesia confirms 91st bird flu death. Excerpt:
A 31-year-old man from Indonesia’s Sumatra island has been confirmed as dying of bird flu, raising the toll in the nation worst affected by avian flu to 91, the health ministry said on Saturday.
“Both tests are positive,” Daswir Nurdin, from the ministry’s bird flu information centre, told AFP.Two tests for the H5N1 virus must be returned positive before someone is confirmed as dying of avian flu in Indonesia.
Nurdin said that the latest victim died Tuesday in Pekanbaru shortly after arriving at the main general hospital there. He had fallen sick on October 31 and been admitted to a local hospital three days later.
“The number of cases (of bird flu in Indonesia) is 113, of which 91 have been fatal,” he said.
Nurdin added that it was unclear whether the man had come into contact with poultry, the usual method of transmission of the disease to humans.
It's now a few minutes to midnight Saturday in Jakarta, and I don't know what the Indonesian news cycle is. So far, neither Antara nor Jakarta Post has reported this case (or they've buried it deep). But we should get something from them in the next few hours.
Update: Reuters has a few more details, but the case is, like most such deaths, seriously under-reported. The case fatality ratio remains steady at 80.5%. Apart from the 3-year-old whose parents took him home from the hospital, most recent Indonesian cases have been fatal.
