Fergie's Tech Blog

H5N1 News: Turkey Reports Two Human Cases of Bird Flu

A Reuters newswire article, via MSNBC, reports that:

Turkey said on Wednesday two people had been diagnosed with bird flu — the first human cases outside Southeast Asia and China — and a doctor said one of them, a 14-year-old boy, had died from the killer H5N1 strain.

A senior World Health Organization official said the boy had probably died from H5N1, which would mark a dramatic shift westwards for the deadly disease, but Turkish Health Minister Recep Akdag gave no specific details and said samples had been sent to the WHO and Britain for more tests.

If the boy’s death is officially confirmed as being the result of H5N1, it would be the first outside eastern Asia where more than 70 people have been killed by the disease since 2003.

posted by Fergie @ 1/04/2006 04:53:00 PM