First Bird Flu Deaths Outside Asia; More Evidence Of Person-To-Person Transmission

WHO confirms Turkish teens died of bird flu, first cases outside East Asia
16:24:05 EST Jan 5, 2006
HELEN BRANSWELL



(CP) - Two Turkish teenagers who reportedly played with dead chickens have died and the World Health Organization said Thursday they were victims of the H5N1 virus, making them the first human cases outside of the nexus of the avian flu outbreak in East Asia.

A boy, 14, died Sunday and his sister, 15, died Thursday; a third sibling is in hospital in critical condition. All were in close proximity to dying poultry, in a part of eastern Turkey where many families keep fowl around the house.

At least eight other children, including additional members of this family, were under observation as suspected cases, WHO spokesperson Maria Cheng confirmed.

A doctor who treated the youngsters said they likely contracted avian flu while playing with dead chickens, according to the Turkish newspaper Sabah. They had tossed chicken heads around like balls inside their house.

Samples from the dead teenagers are en route to London, where a WHO reference laboratory will do confirmatory testing. But Cheng said even in the absence of those results, the WHO is persuaded the teenagers died of avian flu.

"The (Turkish) national influenza centre in Ankara has a very good working relationship with the U.K. reference lab, so they are confident in their diagnostic capacities," Cheng said from Geneva.

A team of experts from the European Centre for Disease Control and the WHO's European office in Copenhagen left Thursday for Turkey to assist in the investigation of the cases.

Experts want quick answers to a number of troubling questions, including whether there is any indication of human-to-human spread among these cases and whether the virus has changed in any way that would make it easier for it to make the jump from animals to people.

Cheng said the WHO hasn't ruled out the possibility of some human-to-human transmission in the group, if additional suspect cases are confirmed as true cases.

"It looks like this could be a rather large cluster. So it's possible this could be common exposure or it could be human-to-human transmission," she said.

"We just don't have the information now to be able to conclude one way or the other how this virus infected these kids."

With these new cases, the WHO has confirmed 144 human cases and 76 deaths in six countries: Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Indonesia, China and Turkey.



© The Canadian Press, 2006

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