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Jakarta - A 32-year-old Indonesian man has died of bird flu, the health ministry said on Wednesday, bringing the death toll to 101 in the nation worst hit by the deadly virus.

The man, who died on Tuesday, was from the Jakarta satellite district of Tangerang, the ministry’s bird flu information centre said in a statement.

He was the seventh confirmed death from bird flu this year.

The victim was said to have first shown symptoms similar to bird flu on January 17, but he was only taken to a village clinic on January 21 before being referred to a hospital in Tangerang on January 24.

The man was then moved to a bird flu referral hospital in Jakarta on January 26, suffering from fever, breathing difficulties, low blood cell count and pneumonia, the health ministry’s bird flu centre has said.

The centre said it was not known whether the victim had contact with infected birds but that several of his neighbours kept pigeons.

Separately, a woman from East Jakarta was in critical condition after being diagnosed earlier this week as infected with the deadly H5N1 strain of bird flu.

The 31-year old woman, was “in critical condition, suffering from serious pneumonia”, Mukhtar Ikhsan, who heads the bird flu team of doctors at the Persahabatan hospital here, told AFP.

She was one of 23 people in Indonesia who have been confirmed as having been infected with the bird flu virus but are still alive.

The woman was taken to the Jakarta hospital on Saturday with a fever, cough and headache. She fell ill on January 18 but only sought treatment at a local hospital on January 22 and was later referred to the Persahabatan hospital, one of the two bird flu referral hospitals in Jakarta.

The bird flu information centre has said the patient lived in a neighbourhood with backyard farms and a wet market selling poultry.

Humans are typically infected with bird flu by coming into direct contact with infected poultry, but experts fear the H5N1 virus may mutate into a form easily transmissible between humans, sparking a deadly global pandemic.

The concern stems from past influenza pandemics. A pandemic in 1918, just after the end of World War I, killed 20 million people worldwide.

The virus is now endemic in birds across nearly all of Indonesia’s 33 provinces.