|
SULAIMANIYAH,
Kurdistan-Iraq, Feb 6, 2006 (AFP) - 19h17 - A second
Iraqi Kurd was confirmed Monday to have died from
the deadly H5N1 bird flu strain as international
teams scrambled to combat the spread of the virus in
the country's north.
Hamma Sur Abdullah, 40, who died of flu-like
symptoms a little over a week after his niece, was
confirmed by a lab in Cairo as having died of the
same cause, a senior Kurdish health official told
AFP.
A few days after Abdullah's death, the World Health
Organisation (WHO) lab confirmed his niece Shajin
Abdel Qader had died of bird flu, galvanizing an
international response.
Earlier Monday the WHO said there were seven more
suspected cases of bird flu in Iraqi Kurdistan.
"Apart from the girl who died there are seven
suspected cases of bird flu and we have taken their
blood samples and sent them to Cairo for further
investigation," Naeema al-Gasseer, the WHO
representative in Iraq, told reporters before news
of the cause of Abdullah's death emerged.
Further tests are underway in Britain on virus
samples from Abdullah, as well as on samples from a
woman who comes from the same region and remains in
hospital.
The two WHO teams were out in the field in Kurdistan
Monday assessing the capacity of the region's
medical and veterinary services to tackle the threat
from the virus.
A large consignment of masks, gloves and gowns was
being shipped from the United States to help Iraqi
doctors tackle any larger outbreak.
"What Iraq needs is lots of personal protection
equipment such as masks, gloves, gowns and
disinfectants to curb the spread of the disease,"
said Jon C. Bowersox, health attache at the US
embassy.
"A 900 kilo (1,980 pound) consignment of this
equipment is on its way from the United States to
Iraq and will arrive here in the next two days," he
told AFP.
"The idea is to prepare Iraq to ward off any
widespread threat."
Bowersox, who is working with the health ministry to
help check the spread of the virus, said the issue
was not a shortage of medicines or equipment but how
to make it quickly available.
The WHO said it was dispatching thousands of doses
of the anti-influenza drug Tamiflu after reports of
an acute shortage.
"At the moment this is an agricultural emergency,"
said one of the vets, Sam Yingst from the two-member
team that reached Kurdistan Monday.
"But we believe that there is a possibility that it
may become a human public emergency though it will
require a significant change in the nature of the
virus."
A massive cull of poultry has been underway in
Kurdistan and Yingst said the tests on the dead
girl's uncle would be key to assessing whether the
virus was mutating into something even more
dangerous.
"We will come to know from the tests of the second
person whether or not the virus has shifted or
drifted, but at the moment there is no indication of
that because, had it occurred, there would have been
more cases," he told reporters Sunday.
"And if at all it has happened, then this
possibility has been elevated by a very significant
notch."
In the province of Diyala along the Iranian border,
health ministry officials were spreading
disinfectant around poultry-producing areas.
"We are checking people coming from Kurdistan and
Iran to Diyala and spreading disinfectants on their
vehicles," Hashim Ibrahim, head of Diyala's
veterinary department.
"We have also closed the market in the centre of
(the provincial capital) Baquba as usually there are
many clusters of people."
Ibtisam Aziz, head of a committee set up to fight
the virus, said it was still confined to the village
in the Raniya district of Sulaimaniyah province
where the dead girl lived.
Turkey, which has had 21 cases of the flu strain,
was previously the only country outside east Asia to
report fatalities from the virus. Four people have
died there.
AFP
Top |
® 