Bird Flu-Indonesia deaths and Pakistan outbreak.

JAKARTA, Feb 6 - On Tuesday two more Indonesians were confirmed to have bird flu and Pakistan reported its first case in a year after finding the deadly virus was found in a small flock of chickens near the capital Islamabad.

The H5N1 virus has surfaced again in Asia in recent months, and has been found in poultry flocks in South Korea, Japan, Thailand and Vietnam.
The H5N1 virus has also spread into the Middle East, Africa and Europe since it reemerged in 2003 and outbreaks have been detected in birds in around 50 countries.

Indonesia has the highest human bird flu death toll and the latest human case was a girl from Jakarta who had caught a wild bird which died two days later.

The other was a West Java man who lived in an area where many poultry had died.
Indonesia has had 63 human deaths from the highly pathogenic H5N1 bird flu virus, six of them this year. The virus is endemic in poultry in most of the provinces in the country of 17,000 islands.

The two new cases came as Indonesia stopped sharing human genetic samples of the most deadly strain of bird flu with foreign laboratories. It wants to keep control of the intellectual property rights of the H5N1 strain.
"We can't share samples for free. There should be rules of the game for it," said the health ministry's spokeswoman, Lily Sulistyowati. "Just imagine they could research, use and patent the Indonesia strain. We can't give the samples but we can share data in the gene bank."

Sulistyowati said Indonesia would sign a Memorandum of Understanding with U.S. medical products maker Baxter International on Wednesday to collaborate on making a human bird flu vaccine. "The vaccine is to prevent poultry-to-human infection. That's what we need for the current situation and not for the future pandemic," she said. Baxter has confirmed it expected to conclude a "framework for future collaboration" with Indonesia, but said it would still abide by World Health Organisation rules on sharing virus samples, the Financial Times newspaper said.
Pakistan

Mohammad Afzal, Livestock Commissioner at the Ministry of Agriculture in Pakistan, said all the chickens in a flock of about 40 birds in Rawalpindi, a city near Islamabad, had died or been culled due to H5N1.
"It has been contained and there is no danger of the spread of this virus because there are no poultry farms near this house," he told Reuters.
Pakistan's first reported cases were found in chickens in February last year in North West Frontier Province and this resulted in about 40,000 chickens being culled. Fortunately, there have been no human cases in Pakistan.
(Reuters)