Indonesia recorded 12 new A/H1N1 cases, putting the total cases to 64, the Indonesian Health Ministry said in a statement on Sunday.

Director General of disease control and environmental health Prof. Dr. Tjandra Yoga Aditama said in the statement that the new patients were aged from 8 to 40 years, and five of them had the history of travel to overseas, such as Malaysia, Singapore, Turkey, Japan and New Zealand.

Two of the 12 persons were foreigners and the rest were Indonesian citizens, he said. Seven of them were males and the rest were females, and eight persons were being treated in the Sulianti Saroso Hospital and two in the Gatot Subroto Hospital in Jakarta, one in the Sanglah Hospital in Bali and another in the Hassan Sadikin Hospital in Bandung of West Java, said Aditama.

So far, of the total 64 cases, 43 of them were male and 21 were female, he said.

The avian A/H1N1 influenza virus has a fatality rate of 0.4 percent.

Experts fear that the multiple combine of the A/H1N1 virus with avian influenza H5N1 virus in Indonesia could create a new type of virus with the speed of spread similar to the A/H1N1 and the severity of attack equal to the H5N1 virus.

The archipelago country with over 17,500 islands had been hit the hardest by the bird flu virus.

The A/H1N1 has spread among humans in Indonesia.

Indonesia has been on alert on the disease since the severity of the threat from the virus on the third level. The World Health Organization has recently raised the alert level from five to six, which means the pandemic has occurred.

(Xinhua News Agency July 13, 2009)