The health authorities have placed a remote tribal area in Sarawak under quarantine after a deadly outbreak killed 13 children and an adult, officials said today.

"I have issued a directive to isolate the entire area," Deputy Chief Minister George Chan Hong Nam was quoted as saying by The Star.

"Movement of people out of the area is prohibited and those going in will be restricted," he said adding that medical officers had been sent to the area to enforce the quarantine imposed on Sunday and vaccinate residents.

"This is in order to prevent spread of the disease and to assess the situation," the Health Ministry's Disease Control Division director Ramlee Rahmat was quoted as saying by the Bernama news agency.

"We need to assess the situation in order to determine the spread of the disease and to contain the outbreak by controlling the movement of people in and out of the area," he said.

New strain?

The measles outbreak has killed 13 children and an adult from a remote tribal community in Sarawak state since Dec 27.

The Penan community in the area had never before been exposed to measles but a local man had married an outsider and they had returned to the settlement recently, Chan said over the weekend.

A total of 66 measles cases had been reported in less than a month, killing one man and 13 children between the ages of three months and five years, he said.

"We are trying to find out whether this is a new strain of the virus and why the outbreak is so serious," Chan said.

Those who died lived in a traditional longhouse at Sungai Urun in Belaga, about 150km inland from the coastal town of Bintulu.

Chan said there was a danger that the outbreak could be more widespread and a team of medics had been sent into the jungle-clad region to see whether other communities had been affected.