The death of a woman in West Java’s Banten province has brought Indonesia’s human death toll from bird flu to 95, Health Ministry officials reported Monday.

The 32-year-old woman died on January 10 at home after her family had taken her out of a hospital where she had been receiving treatment a day before as she was accusing fever and difficulty in breathing, said Suharda Ningrum of the health ministry’s bird flu centre, according to Reuters.

Two laboratory tests had confirmed that she was infected with the bird flu virus.

"She bought a live chicken and some eggs from a market and cooked them," Ningrum said, adding there were also chickens living in her backyard.

A 24-year-old woman from Jakarta died on Christmas day after becoming infected with the virus from a live chicken she had bought from the market.

Indonesia, which has now had a number of 118 cases of the bird flu in humans, has had the most number of deaths from bird flu of any country.

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.

Last week, Chinese authorities confirmed that a Chinese man who became infected with H5N1 likely from his son died, although there was no scientific evidence that the virus suffered mutations in this case.

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.

Since 2003, there have been 340 cases of human bird flu all over the world, 208 of which have died.