A farmworker in eastern Indonesia has tested positive for bird flu, health officials said Wednesday, in the country's first human case of the virus that has killed at least 54 people elsewhere in Southeast Asia.
The worker from southern Sulawesi island is healthy and has shown no symptoms of the illness, but two tests at a Hong Kong laboratory confirmed he had been infected by avian influenza, health officials said. The farmworker was first tested in late March after the epidemic spread to Sulawesi and killed at least 25,000 chickens. That outbreak prompted officials to limit the transfer of poultry off the island and take blood samples from laborers, veterinarians and others exposed to sick chickens. In total, 81 people were tested, and all but one of the samples came back negative, officials said.
Efforts to complete a second test in Hong Kong were prolonged in part because the farmworker had left his job and health investigators had to track him to his home village elsewhere on the island to get a sample.
The second test, finally completed this month, confirmed that the laborer had been infected but that the concentration of antibodies was relatively low, officials said. The finding meant the worker was no longer carrying the virus, but it was impossible to determine how long ago he had caught it, according to Hariadi Wibisono, a director of disease eradication at the Health Ministry.
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