# 2287
Amid increasingly inflammatory rhetoric emanating from Indonesia's Health Ministry, we get this quietly released statement on the Health Ministry's web site giving the details of two confirmed H5N1 deaths in July.
It has been nearly 90 days since the last `official' announcement.
The victims, a 20-year-old male who died on July 31st, and a 38-year-old male who died on July ninth, both hailed from Tangerang city, west of Jakarta.
The 20-year-old appears to be the same victim that an Indonesian official identified back in early August, as having died from the virus.
This reporting from Bloomberg.
Indonesia Reports First Avian Flu Cases Since June (Update1)
By Leony Aurora and Jason Gale
Sept. 9 (Bloomberg) -- Bird flu killed two men on Indonesia's Java island in July, the health ministry said, in its first reports of cases in almost three months.
Both fatalities occurred in Tangerang city in Banten province, according to the Ministry of Health. No cases of the H5N1 strain of avian influenza were reported in August, the ministry in Jakarta said in a statement on its Web site today.
Prior to these, Indonesia's most recent avian flu cases were reported by the World Health Organization on June 19, when the Geneva-based agency recorded 135 infections, including 110 fatalities. Indonesia accounts for more than a third of the global cases of H5N1, the strain world health officials say may mutate into a contagious form capable of touching off a pandemic.
Indonesia's Health Minister Siti Fadilah Supari said on June 6 that the government would delay reporting new avian flu- deaths by six months. She didn't give a reason for the decision.
Calls and a text message to a spokeswoman at the Indonesian health ministry seeking comment weren't immediately returned.
Meanwhile, Indonesia continues to withhold virus samples from the WHO (World Health Organization), insisting that they have intellectual property rights to the virus.
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