Teen Died of Bird Flu in Iraq, WHO Confirms

The World Health Organization confirmed Thursday that an Iraqi teenager who died last month had the H5N1 bird flu virus, and Indonesia’s Health Ministry said a teenager there had become that nation’s 15th fatality from avian flu.

The Iraqi victim was a teenage girl who died Jan. 17 of severe respiratory disease in a Sulaymaniya hospital in northern Iraq.

Specimens from her uncle, who died 10 days later, have been sent to a British laboratory along with those of a 54-year-old woman under treatment for respiratory illness in the same area.

The largely autonomous northern Iraqi region of Kurdistan, where the girl lived, is near areas frequented by migratory birds and not far from the border with Turkey, where four children have died of bird flu.

Poultry culling was underway.

“The detection of the country’s first human case occurred despite the absence of confirmed outbreaks of the disease in poultry,” WHO said. “It also points to an urgent need to investigate the extent of bird outbreaks in northern Iraq and possibly elsewhere.”

The H5N1 virus has claimed more than 85 lives since late 2003.

In Indonesia, “a 15-year-old boy from a Bandung hospital died on Feb. 1 of bird flu according to our local tests,” said I Nyoman Kandun, the Health Ministry’s director-general of disease control.

Samples were sent to a lab in Hong Kong for confirmation.

It was unclear how the boy got the disease. Many Indonesians keep chickens or ducks at their homes.