That came as Thailand recorded its first outbreak of the H5N1 virus in six months and Vietnam recorded its spread through southern provinces.

Indonesia has had four fatalities this year after a six-week lull in cases, taking the number of human deaths from bird flu to 61, the highest in the world. Globally, 159 people are known to have died, most of them in Asia, since 2003.

Nine people with bird flu symptoms were being treated Monday at Jakarta's Persahabatan hospital and its isolation rooms could not accept more patients, said Muchtar Ichsan, head of its bird flu unit. A five-year-old girl was being treated at the intensive care unit, he said.

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"If we get more patients, we will send them to Sulianti Saroso," said Ichsan, referring the major treatment center in North Jakarta.

Seven of the patients at Persahabatan came from Bekasi, a town east of Jakarta. An 18-year-old man being treated there has been confirmed to have bird flu after his mother died of the disease Thursday.

Nyoman Kandun, director general of communicable disease control at the health ministry, said earlier the positive test of the son signaled a cluster, but there was no evidence of human-to- human transmission of the virus.

The largest known cluster of human bird flu cases worldwide occurred last May in the Karo district of North Sumatra province, where as many as seven people in an extended family died. The cluster triggered fears the virus had mutated into a form that could spread easily between people.

Bird flu is endemic in around half of Indonesia's 33 provinces and the vast, developing country has struggled to contain the disease.

Millions of backyard chickens live in close proximity to humans and health education campaigns have often been patchy and rules difficult to enforce with the country's power structure increasingly devolved to the provinces.

Health Minister Siti Fadillah Supari said most victims came into contact with poultry around the house.

"In principle, there should be no birds in residential areas," the minister said, adding that regulations banning backyard poultry will be introduced in the three worst-hit regions.

In Thailand, an Agriculture Ministry official said Monday tests confirmed ducks in the northern province of Phitsanulok had been infected with the H5N1 virus and about 1,900 were culled.

Thailand's last outbreak of the virus in poultry was in late July and the last human death in August - the country's 17th since the virus re-emerged in Asia in late 2003. In Vietnam, which has had no human H5N1 cases since November 2005, bird flu has reached a seventh province as it continues to ravage poultry across the Mekong Delta, with officials braced for a bigger outbreak.

Sixty-six ducks died at a farm in Soc Trang province over the weekend, and tests confirmed they were infected with the H5N1 virus, said Nguyen Huu Minh, vice director of the provincial animal health department.

Preventing the spread of the virus is especially difficult at this time of year, when farmers take ducklings to farms around the region to fatten them up on leftover grains of rice, Minh said.

And local authorities in southwestern Japan began incinerating 12,000 dead chickens on a farm Monday as part of efforts to stop the spread of bird flu.

Experts have confirmed that bird flu killed 3,900 chickens at the farm in Miyazaki prefecture, though it was not clear if it was the H5N1 strain.

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