PHNOM PENH (AFP) - Teenage girls in Cambodia and Indonesia have died of bird flu as the virus continues to stalk across Asia, the region hardest-hit since the disease emerged in 2003, health officials said Friday.

A 13-year-old girl died Thursday in eastern Cambodia along the Vietnam border after eating a sick chicken, the health ministry and the World Health Organisation said in a statement.

She was Cambodia's seventh fatality from the disease, and the first case this year.

Impoverished Cambodia has been lightly hit by the highly pathogenic H5N1 virus, compared to southeast Asian neighbours like Indonesia, Vietnam and Thailand.

The 15-year-old girl who died Thursday in Jakarta was the 73rd fatality in Indonesia, the country worst hit by the disease, according to the national bird flu information centre.

Another man showing bird flu symptoms died Wednesday in Solo, about 500 kilometres (300 miles) from Jakarta. Tests are still under way to confirm if he had the virus.

Experts were still trying to determine how the Indonesian girl had caught the virus, but most human infections have occurred after contact with sick birds.

The government has banned the popular practice of keeping chickens in backyards in Jakarta to try and curb the disease's spread.

Both Cambodia and Indonesia dispatched teams of experts to areas around the girls' homes to search for birds or people showing signs of the disease.

In Jakarta the deputy director of the hospital where the girl was treated said that so far, none of her family were showing symptoms.

"There are (pet) birds in her house but they are not sick," Sardikin Giriputro told AFP.

"Two surveillance teams are now working to see if the virus is present elsewhere in her neighbourhood," he added.

In Cambodia, the health ministry has already received reports of sick birds in the region where the victim lived.

Although the kingdom has been praised for its rapid action against bird flu, health officials have long feared the virus could go undetected in the countless small family farms where most of Cambodia's poultry are raised.

But those small farms also help prevent bird flu from becoming entrenched in the country because Cambodia's poultry industry is so much smaller than in its richer neighbours, the head of the infectious disease department, Sok Touch said.

"We don't have big poultry farms like other countries," Sok Touch said.

"When any outbreaks among poultry are confirmed, we are able to prevent the spread of the virus and disinfect the areas well," he told AFP.

The last reported outbreak here was in September, but officials have warned that smuggled poultry poses a threat.

The World Health Organisation says the deadly H5N1 strain of bird flu has infected 288 people and killed around 170 of them, mostly in southeast Asia, since 2003.

Scientists say multiple strains of the disease originated in southern China and spread elsewhere.

They worry the virus could mutate into a form easily spread among humans, leading to a global pandemic with the potential to kill millions.

The fear stems from the lessons of past influenza pandemics. One in 1918, just after the end of World War I, killed 20 million people worldwide.