International tests have confirmed a 24-year-old Indonesian man who died this month had bird flu, a Health Ministry official said yesterday, taking the country’s death toll from the virus to 24.

Indonesia has the second highest bird flu death toll of any country. But the government has resisted mass culling of birds, citing the expense and impracticality in a country where keeping a few chickens or ducks in the backyards is common.

“A 24-year-old who died on April 8, 2006, has been confirmed positive of bird flu. The confirmation came from Hong Kong on April 18,” the official at the ministry’s bird flu information centre told Reuters. Local tests are not considered definitive and blood samples are sent to a World Health Organisation-affiliated laboratory in Hong Kong for confirmation.

Not counting the latest death, the H5N1 avian flu virus has killed 109 people worldwide since 2003, according to the WHO. The virus has spread in birds at an alarming rate in recent months, sweeping through parts of Europe, down into Africa and across into South Asia.

It is difficult for humans to catch, but experts fear the virus could evolve into a form passed easily from human to human, causing a pandemic that could kill millions. In Indonesia, the H5N1 virus has been reported in birds in about two-thirds of the country’s provinces.

A sweeping door-to-door campaign to try to control the disease in the capital Jakarta, the country’s largest city with about 12 million people, only got underway at the end of February.