The 21-year-old sister of a boy who died of bird flu earlier this month also has contracted the disease, a Health Ministry official said on Fri 29 Sep 2006. Meanwhile, another person suspected of having bird flu was admitted to a hospital in Bandung, West Java, where 2 brothers died this week.

The head of the ministry's bird flu information center, Runizar Ruesin, said the sister, currently being treated at Dr. Soetomo Hospital in Surabaya, East Java, had contact with sick and dead fowl, as did her 11-year-old brother. He died on 18 Sep 2006. 18.

"She has been declared an avian influenza-positive case by the ministry lab and by NAMRU," he told Reuters, referring to a U.S. Naval Medical Research Unit based in Jakarta. Soetomo hospital said the woman was also suffering from pneumonia.

"Her condition is stable but her pneumonia has not improved yet. She is still being supported by a respirator," Urip Murtejo, the hospital's deputy director, told Reuters.

Another official at the Ministry, Nyoman Kandun, said a new cluster of bird flu infections was confirmed with the woman testing positive. "This is a family cluster," Kandun was quoted as saying by Associated Press.

Most of the country's 52 fatal cases have been linked to contact with infected chickens or their droppings. But the World Health Organization (WHO) said the virus passed between humans in one large cluster of cases in a single family in North Sumatra earlier this year. A cluster of infection takes place when a group of people are infected from the same source of sick poultry.

Scientists fear that cluster cases -- with 7 [i.e. the 7 members of the same cluster?] reported in the country as of late August 2006 -- raise the likelihood of H5N1 mutating into a form easily passed between humans that could spark a global flu pandemic with a potentially massive death toll.

The H5N1 strain of bird flu has killed at least 148 people worldwide since it started ravaging poultry stocks in Asia 3 years ago, according to WHO. The country has been criticized for failing to aggressively attack the virus in poultry, either by mass slaughters or vaccination. It has said it lacks the resources to compensate farmers for slaughtered birds.

In Bandung, a 41-year-old woman was suspected of having bird flu upon her arrival at Hasan Sadikin Hospital on Friday morning. Head of the hospital's bird flu prevention team, Hadi Jusuf, said the native of Sapan in Bandung regency, also showed symptoms of dengue fever.

"She's in a poor health condition, feverish but her lungs are fine. Still, we consider her a suspected (bird flu) case because there were dead fowl in her neighborhood."

[The 21-year -old woman described in the 1st part of this rather confused report appears to be the woman identified as the 69th confirmed case. It was concluded in that this was not an example of human-to-human transmission of infection because the woman and her bird flu-positive deceased brother had been in contact with the same flock of diseased chickens. Now another Health Ministry official has designated this a "family cluster".

The bird flu status of the 41-year-old woman hospitalised in Bandung is dubious. She exhibits symptoms of dengue fever and is considered to be a suspected bird flu victim solely on the basis of contact with diseased poultry.