# 1455
Tonight (well, actually it's Friday morning on the other side of the world) the newswires are carrying word that a 16-year-old girl has tested positive for the H5N1 virus in Indonesia.
Newshounds are also tracking several others in Indonesian hospitals but results of their testing have not been made public.
Indonesia confirms another bird flu case
JAKARTA - A 16-year-old girl from the outskirts of the Indonesian capital has been hospitalized after becoming infected with the bird flu virus, an official at the health ministry said Friday.
The girl is being treated in a Jakarta hospital for the deadly disease, which has claimed 94 lives in Indonesia, the highest number of any nation. The teenager is the 117th confirmed case here, where the disease is now endemic.
"Two laboratory tests confirmed that she is infected with the bird flu virus," Joko Suyono, an official at the ministry's bird flu center, told Agence France-Presse.
Two positive results of tests on blood and tissue samples from a victim are needed before Indonesian authorities confirm a bird flu infection.
The girl, who is from the satellite city of Bekasi, was first admitted to a private hospital there on January 4, four days after she began to feel ill. She was referred to the Jakarta hospital on January 10.
"She is still being treated in an intensive care unit but her condition is quite stable," Muchtar Ikhsan, a doctor treating her at Persahabatan hospital, told AFP.
"We are closely monitoring her condition," he added.
The bird flu center's Suyono said that two months before she fell ill, several chickens in her neighborhood had died suddenly.
"She also ate three eggs half-cooked two weeks before getting sick... The eggs might not have been washed properly before being cooked," he said, referring to the fact that chicken faeces, which can carry the virus, may have been on the shells.
But Suyono said that the health ministry had not yet confirmed whether the chickens in her neighborhood had tested positive for the virus.
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