National Park Service officials said there never has been a reported human case of bubonic plague originating from the parks or national monuments.

"We come down on the conservative side when it comes to closing campgrounds," said Joe Winkelmaier of the U.S. Public Health Service. "We just like to be sure when it comes to plague."

Several weeks ago, park rangers noticed a large number of dead field mice at Natural Bridges, about 40 miles west of Blanding. Chief Ranger Ralph Jones showed that tests indicated they died from the plague.

Rangers plan to insecticides to kill fleas in the campground area. Humans usually contract bubonic plague after being bitten by fleas that have bitten infected rodents. The campground could be reopened as soon as next week.

Plague occurs throughout the West, but is concentrated in the Four Corners area of Utah, Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona. An average of 18 cases involving humans are reported each year in the United States, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. About one in seven victims die.

Worldwide it was also an above-normal month, but not a record breaker, finishing as the seventh warmest April worldwide, according to the Data Center, a branch of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The warmth led to below normal home energy demand for the month, the agency added.

The warmth was particularly noted in Texas and Oklahoma which had their warmest April on record.

For New Mexico, Kansas, Arkansas, Missouri and Tennessee it was the second warmest April.

None of the 48 contiguous states was cooler than average, but it was below normal for the month in Alaska.

Drought persisted across large portions of the southern and southwestern United States, the Center said, but nationwide rainfall was near normal for the month.

And it noted there was a series of tornado outbreaks during the first half of the month affecting parts of the Midwest and central Plains as well as the Deep South.

The warning centre in Hawaii, which launched the test exercise for more than 30 countries, said none of the earthquakes triggered genuine Pacific-wide tsunami warnings, but the two biggest could cause small local tsunamis.

There were no immediate reports of casualties or damage from the earthquake zones.

The Pacific Tsunami Warning System (PTWS) test was part of an effort to strengthen defences following the December 26, 2004 killer waves that swept across countries in the northern Indian Ocean, killing around 220,000 people.

"All went very well," Koyanagi said, while there were some areas where communications would need to be improved.

This mainly involved small island nations in the South Pacific, where communication systems were not well developed.

"I think for the first test there may have been a few that we had difficulty getting through to.

"The fact that the test ran for a pretty long period of time allowed us to backtrack and eventually get hold of just about everybody," he said.

The exercise began with a mock alert about the quake off the coast of Chile, which theoretically sparked a tsunami across the eastern Pacific. The second phase of the test involved a fake quake north of the Philippines.

Koyanagi said the test focused on communications and "certainly this is a huge improvement over what would have occurred if we did not conduct the test.

"This forced people in these countries and our centre to look at ways in which to cooperate and pass on information between agencies."

It was hoped that the test would become an annual event, he said.

Some countries, including the Philippines and Malaysia, staged partial evacuations as part of the exercise.

In the Philippines, civil defense officials evacuated the coastal village of Buhatan in the Bicol peninsula, 340 kilometers (212 miles) southeast of Manila, early Wednesday, taking all 1,143 residents to higher ground.

The drill took place before the simulated tsunami from the Chile quake was due to reach the shores of the western Pacific, the government seismology office said.

The alert message was successfully passed from regional to provincial to local officials, seismologist Esmeralda Banganan of the Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology told AFP.

The Pacific Tsunami Warning System has been in existence for more than 40 years, but exercises have until now only been conducted at national or local level.

The PTWS comes under the aegis of UNESCO's Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission, which last year also set down the foundations for a tsunami early warning system in the Indian Ocean.

"However the current investigation that we have has no evidence of further spread beyond the cluster, so that's quite good news for us because it tells that the virus is not spreading further," she said, warning however that the investigation was still ongoing.

She said two more people were possibly involved in the cluster: a 37-year-old woman from whom samples were not taken was considered the first person to have shown symptoms while results on a 10-year-old male who had also died were still being awaited.

The fifth death reported Wednesday was from Surabaya in East Java, she said.

I Nyoman Kandun, director for the health ministry's communicable disease control centre, told AFP earlier that the five deaths had come from a related family.

"They were apparently infected at a family event," he said. Kandun said earlier this week that the five had died within days of each other over the past three weeks.

A doctor at the Adam Malik hospital in Medan said the bird flu patient, Jones Ginting, was recovering, the state-run Antara news agency reported.

Doctor Alwinsyan Abidin told Antara that Ginting was no longer suffering a high fever or breathing difficulties and was eating and walking.

The vast majority of deaths in Indonesia have so far occurred in the capital Jakarta and its surroundings, where many people live close to poultry despite the urban environment.

Indonesia has witnessed more bird flu deaths than any other country this year. It has the world's second highest number of fatalities since 2003, after Vietnam.

Bird flu has now killed at least 120 people since late 2003, mostly in Asia. Experts fear the virus may mutate into a form that can pass easily between humans, sparking a pandemic.

An expert from the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation said this week that public ignorance about the dangers of bird flu as well as poor co-ordination between various levels of government were the biggest obstacles Indonesia faces in its fight against the virus.

While other Southeast Asian nations like Thailand and Vietnam have had considerable success controlling the spread of the virus, Indonesia has one of the region's highest rates of infections among poultry, Laurence Gleeson said.

He said its epidemic was threatening to spread to Pacific nations after poultry in the easternmost province of Papua was recently found to be infected.

The WHO's Asia chief Shigeru Omi this month urged Indonesia to work harder at grassroots level to combat the deadly H5N1 strain of bird flu.

Quake rocks western Indonesia

An undersea earthquake measuring 6.3 on the Richter scale rocked Indonesia's remote Nias Island on Tuesday.

The Bureau of Meteorology and Geophysics said the epicentre of the quake lay in the Indian Ocean at a depth of 33km, about 110km southwest of the town of Teluk Dalam town.

Earthquakes are frequent in Indonesia: its 17,000 islands are part of what is called the Pacific Ring of Fire.

The US Geological Survey said the magnitude 6.8 quake struck at 1528 GMT. It said there was no risk of a major tsunami.

The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center said the earthquake was not expected to trigger a major tsunami.

Previous quake damage

In March, 2005, a powerful earthquake devastated Nias Island, killing some 1,000 people and leaving tens of thousands homeless.

It was three months after a powerful undersea quake off the northern tip of Sumatra caused a devastating tsunami and wrought widespread destruction on December 26, 2004.

Vulcanologists keeping the mountain on 24-hour watch were not immediately available for comment on the eruption just after 5 p.m. (6 a.m. EDT), which sent debris plunging down its western flanks, but appeared to fell well short of populated areas.

Earlier Wednesday, farmers journeyed high up Merapi's slopes collecting grass for cows and children kicked soccer balls - both within a 3.7-mile zone declared off-limits when the mountain was placed on its highest alert Saturday.

"There is nothing to worry about here," said Warkijho, a 55-year-old farmer who like many in his village deep within the government-ordered evacuation zone has refused to leave. "The scientists may be concerned, but in my heart I know it is safe."

Despite the calm over the last 48 hours, experts had said that Merapi remained dangerous. The mountain has kept spitting out red-hot rocks and lava flows that light the night sky.

A 3 million-cubic-yard lava dome that has built up over the mountain's slow-burn eruption in recent weeks was still perched on the crater and could collapse, triggering a deadly surge in ash and gas, scientists have warned.

President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono on Wednesday met with some of the more than 5,000 people who have fled the volcano and are staying in temporary housing such as converted schools. Yudhoyono and his wife stayed Tuesday night in a tent among the refugees.

Yudhoyono urged those still refusing to leave the evacuation zone to move to safety.

Most of those refusing to go were farmers, and have crops to tend or animals to feed.

Mount Merapi, which translates as "Fire Mountain," has erupted scores of times over the last 200 years, often with deadly results. It is one of the world's most active volcanoes.

In 1994, 60 people were killed by a searing gas cloud while in 1930, more than a dozen villages were incinerated, leaving 1,300 dead.

The volcano plays a central role in the belief system of villagers living on its fertile land. Many of them believe spirits watching over the volcano will warn them of danger.

An 80-year-old man entrusted by the nearby royal court to be the spiritual guardian of the volcano has been criticized because he has refused to evacuate, along with many people living in villages within a few miles of the crater.

But instead of going down the mountain, mystic Maridjan, hiked up it Tuesday morning to mediate and has not yet returned, his daughter and other villagers said Wednesday.

"I know what Dad is like," said the daughter, Sulami. "He needs to do this, and God willing, things will now be calm."