GENEVA, March 13: The UN’s official tally of human cases of highly pathogenic bird flu has reached 177, with 98 of them fatal, the World Health Organisation said on Monday.

The WHO updated its figures after receiving formal confirmation that the H5N1 avian influenza strain had claimed two more lives in Indonesia.

The WHO only reports cases confirmed by its accredited laboratories.

WHO officials said that test results were still due on samples taken from eleven people from Azerbaijan, three of whom had died, to confirm if they had been infected during an outbreak among poultry there.

The H5N1 virus has surged among poultry flocks since 2003, initially striking in Asia before hitting the Middle East, Africa and Europe.

Its impact on humans has so far been relatively limited, since it spreads from infected birds to people in close proximity.

But experts fear that it may mutate into a form that could easily be transmitted from person to person, and that such a new virus could launch a global flu pandemic like those which have claimed millions of lives in the past.

Most of the victims in the UN agency’s count were in Vietnam.

H5N1 first struck there at the end of 2003 and continued into 2005. A total of 93 cases and 42 deaths were logged by the WHO.

In Indonesia, where the disease first hit last year and again in recent months, there have been a total of 29 cases and 22 deaths.

In Thailand there have been 22 cases, among them 14 fatalities, in China 15 cases and 10 deaths, while all four patients died in Cambodia’s 2005 outbreak.

The WHO has recorded two cases in Iraq, both of them fatal, while the figure in neighbouring Turkey was 12 cases and four deaths.—AFP