JAKARTA (AFP) - A 29-year-old man has died of bird flu in Indonesia, bringing the death toll in the country worst hit by the virus here to 80, a health ministry official said Thursday.

The victim was from Sumatra island's Riau province and had come into contact with sick birds.

"I've just received confirmation... that the 29-year-old man died from bird flu," Muhammad Nadhirin, an official from the ministry's bird flu information centre, told AFP.

"He is the 80th victim dead in Indonesia from 100 cases," Nadhirin said.

Azizman Daan, head of the bird flu team at the hospital that treated the victim, said he was admitted on June 11 with a fever after being sick for a week.

"He had had contact with dead chickens -- three out of his five chickens had suddenly died. He slaughtered another sick chicken and cooked it," he said.

Contact with infected birds is the most common form of transmission of the deadly virus to humans, experts say.

Daan said that a team had been sent to his village to monitor the condition of the man's family and neighbours.

Scientists worry the bird flu 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. A flu pandemic in 1918, just after the end of World War I, killed 20 million people worldwide.

The latest death was reported as military-run Myanmar said it had detected a fresh outbreak of bird flu among poultry north of Yangon and had slaughtered some 1,000 chickens.

It was the first bird flu outbreak in Myanmar, which has not reported any human bird flu cases, since late March.

Before the latest death, World Health Organisation (WHO) figures show the virus has killed 190 people since the end of 2003, mostly in Southeast Asia.

A top UN official said on Wednesday that Indonesia was among those countries facing the biggest difficulties in fighting deadly bird flu.

Hassan El Bushra said it topped the "acute outbreak" list of nations, alongside Egypt and Turkey, where avian influenza remains a big problem.

El Bushra, regional adviser with the WHO's communicable disease team, said economic reasons made the virus especially difficult to contain in Indonesia. Culling thousands of chickens to stop an outbreak from spreading means big losses for poultry farmers and backyard chicken rearers.

"People there cannot understand why you should cull all the poultry in the whole village when only one person is found sick," he said.

Indonesia stepped up its campaign this year to battle bird flu, banning in the capital Jakarta the popular practice of keeping poultry in backyard homes.

Officials were criticised for being slow to act when the virus first appeared in the archipelago nation.