Thirteen people from a village in North Sumatra are due to be tested for bird flu after falling sick, Indonesian health officials said on Thursday, according to Reuters. The 13, from Air Batu village, were hospitalised this week after suffering fever, but their conditions had improved on Thursday and they might not be suffering from the disease, a health official said. A bird flu surveillance team from Indonesia's health ministry has been sent to the area. "Although they found dead chickens in the area, the symptoms are not like bird flu," said Erna Tresnaningsih, the health ministry's director of animal-borne disease control. Sari Setiogi, a spokeswoman for the World Health Organisation in Geneva, and the head of a laboratory in Jakarta conducting the tests said the findings were expected later on Thursday. A seven-year-old girl and an eight-month-old child were being treated in Adam Malik hospital in North Sumatra's capital Medan with Tamiflu, the medication most often used to treat bird flu, said hospital spokesman Sinar Ginting. The country's largest known cluster of bird flu cases in humans occurred in May 2006 in the Karo district of North Sumatra province, where as many as 7 people in an extended family died.
