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."