Here are some of the latest health and medical news developments, compiled by the editors of HealthDay:

Indonesian Woman Dies of Bird Flu

Indonesian health officials have confirmed that a woman who died earlier this week was killed by bird flu, making her the country’s eighth victim of the disease.

Tests done in Hong Kong showed that the 25-year-old woman died from the lethal H5N1 strain of bird flu, BBC News reported.

The woman had had contact with dead chickens before being admitted to a Jakarta hospital, the news service said.

The H5N1 bird flu virus has killed nearly 70 people in South East Asia — most of them in Vietnam and Thailand — since the outbreak began in 2003.

Meanwhile, student loan calculator officials in Ukraine acknowledged Saturday that country’s first outbreak of bird flu, discovered among some 1,500 dead chickens and geese in the Black Sea region of Crimea, the Associated Press reported.

The dead birds, mostly domesticated chickens and geese, tested positive for the H5 type of bird flu, the Agriculture Ministry said. Samples would be sent to laboratories in Italy and England for tests to determine whether it is the H5N1 strain, the AP said.

While person-to-person transmission of the H5N1 strain is rare, health officials are worried that the germ could mutate, making human transmission much easier, leading to a global pandemic of the disease.

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Heparin Antibodies May Pose Risk for Heart-Surgery Patients

Patients who develop antibodies to the anti-clotting drug heparin nearly double their risk of death or serious complication after heart surgery, a new study suggests.

“Complications after heart surgery are typically attributed to the surgery alone,” said Dr. Thomas Slaughter, co-principal investigator on the project and a professor of anesthesiology at Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center. “Our study examined whether development of heparin antibodies before surgery poses an independent risk.”

The study, which involved 466 patients scheduled to undergo either coronary artery bypass or valve replacement surgery, was done by investigators at Wake Forest University Baptist and Duke University medical centers. It’s the first study to demonstrate a relationship between heparin antibodies and complications after cardiac surgery, the researchers said.

Heparin is administered intravenously during many procedures, including kidney dialysis, heart catheterization or angioplasty, as well as during heart and vascular surgeries. Estimates suggest that nearly half of patients treated with heparin develop the antibodies, which may last for months.

The researchers theorized that in patients with heparin antibodies, subsequent treatment with heparin activates blood components that cause clotting and inflammation, increasing the risk for heart attacks, heart rhythm problems, strokes and other complications.

“While it is too early to recommend universal testing for the antibodies, our study is the most definitive evidence to date that heparin antibodies increase the risk for death and complications associated with cardiac surgery,” Slaughter said.

The study results appear in the December issue of the Journal of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery.

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Face Transplant Patient’s First Word is ‘Merci’

The first word spoken by a French woman who had the world’s first partial face transplant was “merci,” one of her doctors said at a news conference Friday in Lyon.

The surgeons, Dr. Jean-Michel Dubernard and Dr. Bernard Devauchelle, said that the 38-year-old woman regained consciousness 24 hours after Sunday’s transplant and there were no post-surgical problems, the Associated P