Hariadi Wibisono, the ministry's director of control of animal-borne diseases, said that raised Indonesia's total confirmed human bird flu cases to 23, according to Reuters.
Turkey and Iraq last month became the latest countries outside Asia to report human cases of the H5N1 strain of avian flu. While it mostly affects birds, bird flu has infected 161 people and killed 86 of them since 2003, according to the World Health Organization.
Wibisono said the newly confirmed Indonesian deaths were of a 22-year-old male chicken seller from Jakarta who died late last month and a 15-year-old boy who died in the West Java city of Bandung this week.
Most Indonesian cases have shown the victims had contact with dead chickens. One of the greatest fears of experts is that the H5N1 virus will mutate to become easily passed between humans, triggering a pandemic. The current H5N1 strain of bird flu has not mutated.
