JAKARTA, Jan 16 (Reuters) - Indonesia was readying more hospitals on Tuesday to deal with a spike in bird flu cases after a Jakarta hospital said it was struggling to cope with patients suffering from symptoms of the virus. "In the event of an escalation, more hospitals must be prepared. We are taking an inventory of what they need," said Nyoman Kandun, the health ministry's director general of communicable disease control. Four Indonesians have died this year after a six-week lull in cases, taking the number of human deaths from bird flu in the country to 61, the highest in the world. Kandun did not say how many hospitals were being prepared, but Jakarta's biggest army hospital, Gatot Subroto, would be well-equipped to handle bird flu patients. His comments came after a doctor at Jakarta's Persahabatan hospital, one of two designated to treat bird flu cases in the capital, said it was overwhelmed with patients with bird flu symptoms. Six children were discharged after tests found they did not have the virus, but three are still in hospital and another three with similar symptoms have been admitted, said Muchtar Ikhsan, head of Persahabatan's bird flu ward. They include an 18-year-old man confirmed to have bird flu and his father from Serpong in west Java, who has similar symptoms but has so far tested negative for the H5N1 virus. The teenager's mother died of the disease last Thursday, raising fears of another possible cluster in Indonesia, where bird flu is endemic in around half of its 33 provinces. But Kandun said the father's negative results reinforced the suspicion that genetic factors were responsible for transmission of bird flu among humans. "Each of the 10 cluster cases that we have involved blood relatives," he said. The largest known cluster of human bird flu cases worldwide occurred in May 2006 in the Karo district of North Sumatra province, where as many as seven people in an extended family died. The cluster triggered fears the virus had mutated into a form that could spread easily between people. In a bid to stem the spread of the virus, the government is considering banning backyard fowl in three provincial areas worst hit by the H5N1 bird flu virus. Indonesia has struggled to contain the disease as millions of backyard chickens live in close proximity to humans and health education campaigns have often been patchy. Rules are also difficult to enforce with the country's power structure increasingly devolved to the provinces.Indonesian officials have, however, said they have made progress in their efforts to fight bird flu.
