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WHO confirms deadly bird flu in Turkey
By Benjamin Harvey (AP)
Updated: 2006-01-08 10:27
Teenage siblings who died of bird flu in Turkey were the first humans outside
East Asia to succumb to the deadly H5N1 strain that has apparently been spread
by migratory birds, the U.N. health agency said Saturday.
A British laboratory confirmed Saturday that the 15-year-old girl and her
14-year-old brother were infected with the virus, said Maria Cheng, spokeswoman
for the World Health Organization. Testing is continuing on an 11-year-old
sister who died Friday.
"She had similar symptoms and the clinical course of her illness was the
same," Cheng said. "So it would be very probable that she died of H5N1, but
right now we don't have the laboratory test to prove that."
Five WHO experts were to travel Sunday to the city of Van, near the border
with Iran, not far from the village where the three children died, to try to
determine whether the disease was spread from animals or other humans.
Iran restricted movement along its border to prevent the disease from
spreading into the country.
Cheng said Turkish laboratories have so far found that two other children in
a Turkish hospital are infected with H5N1. The British lab Saturday confirmed
one of the cases and may be about to confirm the other, she said.
Altogether Turkish officials are testing about 30 patients — most of them
children — for bird flu, she said.
The spread of the disease from East Asia, where it has killed more than 70
people, was "a concern," but the global risk assessment of a human pandemic was
unchanged, she said.
"Right now these new cases in Turkey — they don't elevate the global risk
assessment, so we're still in the same pandemic alert phase that we've been in
for the last couple of years," said Cheng. "But it's something that needs to be
monitored very closely."
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