JAKARTA - The World Health Organisation confirmed six new human cases of bird flu in Indonesia Monday and said three of the infected people had died.
The new cases bring WHO's global human toll from bird flu to 127 dead, with 224 cases in 10 countries.
WHO said none of the new cases was associated with a suspicious-looking family cluster on the northern part of Indonesia's Sumatra island, and said none of the victims appeared to have infected anyone else.
"The cases are widely dispersed geographically," WHO said in a statement.
And while some of the people appear to have had contact with birds, the global health agency and local officials were working to find out how two others became infected.
They are a 43-year-old man from South Jakarta, who developed symptoms 6 May but who has recovered, and a 15-year-old girl from West Sumatra, who became ill 17 May and who is still in the hospital, WHO said.
Another new case was that of an 18-year-old man from Bandung on Java island who had tested negative earlier in Hong Kong. The latest result classified him as a H5N1 case, said I Nyoman Kandun, director-general of communicable disease control.
The teenager was the brother of a 10-year-old girl who was tested positive for H5N1 by the Hong Kong laboratory last week. Both died last Tuesday.
Local health authorities believe sick chickens infected the brother and sister, as poultry started dying in their village a few days before they became ill, Kandun said.
The Bandung siblings are considered the seventh family cluster in Indonesia, but their case is not triggering as much concern as the cluster in north Sumatra, where H5N1 killed seven people in a single family.
Experts say limited human-to-human transmission of the virus may have occurred in the Sumatran family because several took care of relatives who became ill earlier. WHO says they may have picked up the virus during such close and prolonged contact.
However, genetic analyses of the virus have not found any of the changes known to allow the virus to spread efficiently among people -- a necessary precursor to the start of a pandemic.
"An additional case occurred in a 39-year-old man from West Jakarta. He developed symptoms on 9 May, was hospitalized on 16 May, and died on 19 May," WHO said in a statement on its Web site at http://www.who.int.
"The investigation determined that the man cleaned pigeon feces from blocked roof gutters at his home shortly before symptom onset. No further potential source of exposure was identified."
Pigeons are among the dozens of bird species known to have been infected with H5N1.
Since re-emerging in Asia in late 2003, the virus has spread especially fast in the past six months, moving into parts of the Middle East, Europe and Africa.
Indonesia has been hard hit by avian influenza, with 49 cases reported by the Ministry of Health and 36 deaths.
The virus is very difficult to track in the nation, which is made up of 17,508 islands that stretch 3,200 miles from east to west and where more than 500 languages are spoken by diverse ethnic groups.
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