Indonesia confirmed 22 people positively infected by the A/H1N1 flu virus, bringing the total cases to 86 in the country, the Health Ministry said in a statement on Monday night.

The 22 persons were Indonesian citizens, 9 male and 13 female, of whom five have traveled to the United states, China's Hong Kong, Turkey and Singapore, director general of disease control and environmental health of the ministry Prof. Dr. Tjandra Yoga Aditama said in the statement.

The patients were aged from 2 up to 58 years old, with 18 of them in Jakarta, 2 in Bandung of West Java, 1 in Yogyakarta and another in Surabaya of East Java, he said.

The avian influenza subtype A/H1N1 has spread among humans in Indonesia. The virus has a fatality rate of 0.4 percent.

Experts fear that the multiple combine of the A/H1N1 virus with the 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.

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 14, 2009)