The country’s (Indonesia) biggest vaccine producer, PT Bio Farma, is aiming to produce a vaccine against the deadly strain of the bird flu virus for humans by the end of this year.

Spain, Europe’s biggest tourism destination by revenue, confirmed its first case of bird flu.

Bird flu experts meeting in Paris at the First International Conference on Avian Influenza in Humans were told by leading virologists that it could take 10 years to develop an effective bird flu vaccine.

The remote state, Taraba, in eastern Nigeria, has reported the deadly H5N1 strain of bird flu. Officials in Nigeria say the deadly H5N1 strain of bird flu has spread to another state, bringing the total number of states now affected by the virus to 14.

More testing is needed before China can confirm whether a soldier who died in Beijing in 2003 was an early case of bird flu, the Health Ministry said Monday. The case, first disclosed last month in a letter by Chinese researchers to a US medical journal.

A World Health Organization probe revealed that the bird flu virus mutated within an Indonesian family. An Indonesian man who died from the H5N1 strain of bird flu almost certainly caught the disease from his 10-year-old son. He is the first laboratory-confirmed case of human-to-human transmission of the H5N1 strain.

Fifth person died from bird flu in Egypt on Thursday and experts in Asia expressed concern that poorer countries were unable to put up a co-ordinated fight against the rapid spread of the H5N1 virus.

The Bird Flu virus re-emerged in Asia in 2003, outbreaks have been confirmed in more than 48 countries and territories, according to data from the World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE).

A peasant worker (surnamed Lai, a 21-year-old) has become the 12th Chinese person to die of the bird flu virus. The official Xinhua news agency says he died in the central city of Wuhan on wednesday. It’s still unknown how he contracted the H5N1 bird flu virus.

Indonesia’s agriculture minister said that Indonesia is winning its fight against bird flu and expects to be free of the killer virus by 2008.