An Indonesia woman, 23, from East Jakarta has died from bird flu, raising the country’s death toll to 100, a report from the Indonesia’s bird flu information centre said on Monday.

Tests made at two separate laboratories confirmed that the woman had contracted H5N1. She died on Sunday.

Bird flu also killed a 9-year-old boy and infected two other persons in their 30’s. The boy from Depok, south of Jakarta, became ill January 16 and died yesterday at Sulianti Saroso Hospital after failing to respond to two weeks of treatment, said Joko Suyono of the National Bird Flu Center quoted by the Associated Press. No one knows how the boy contracted the disease.

A 31-year-old woman and a 32-year-old man, who were hospitalized at Persabatan hospital for fever and respiratory problems, also tested positive for the deadly H5N1 virus on Monday, the report said.

According to a statement released by the health ministry, the woman lived in East Jakarta near a poultry slaughterhouse that kept many fowl believed to be the source of her H5N1 infection and the man from Tangerang, west of Jakarta, is believed to have contracted the virus from his neighbor’s pet doves.

 Humans are infected with bird flu by direct contact with infected poultry, but health experts fear the H5N1 virus may mutate into a form easily transmissible between humans, which could start a pandemic. However, the risk seems to be overestimated, according to Bernard Vallat, director general of the Worls Organization for Animal Health. He stated that the virus proved to be very stable although there were concerns that it could mutate into a form that could spread easily among humans.

On the other hand, the World Health Organization (WHO) has warned that the virus, in time, can suffer mutation into a form that can easily be transmitted from a person to another. The health organization fears that this could turn into a global pandemic. However, most human cases so far have involved contact with infected poultry.

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

More than 1.6 million birds have been slaughtered since mid-January, state Animal Husbandry Minister Anisur Rahman said Sunday.

According to the World Health Organization Web site on January 24, at least 221 of the 353 people known to have been infected with the virus have died since late 2003.