The World Health Organization on Thursday sent a team of experts to Turkey to help investigate the deaths of two teenagers from suspected bird flu, a senior official said.
The team, which had been requested by Ankara, included epidemiologists who would try to verify the source of the deadly virus which is believed to have killed a brother and sister in a remote rural district of Turkey near the Armenian border.
WHO officials say that there is little doubt that the deaths were due to the feared H5N1 avian virus, making them the first human cases to occur outside China and Southeast Asia.
On Thursday, a second test in Istanbul had supported the findings of an Ankara laboratory that H5N1 was responsible, said Guenael Rodier, special adviser on communicable diseases at the Geneva-based World Health Organization.
While a final diagnosis would only come after samples were examined at a laboratory in Britain later this week, the Istanbul lab had used a genetic technique that was as good as a fingerprint of the virus, he added.
“I have no reason not to trust the result,” he told Reuters by telephone from the WHO’s European headquarters in Copenhagen.
But the WHO, which had been expecting human cases after the virus was detected amongst wild birds and poultry in Turkey and parts of south-east Europe late last year, said that this did not mean a worldwide flu pandemic had become more likely.
Scientists fear that the deadly virus, which still rarely escapes to humans from birds and poultry, could mutate and become more easily transmissible. In this case, it could trigger a global epidemic in which millions of people could die.
H5N1 has killed 74 people in China and southeast Asia since 2003, but virtually all the cases involved people, as in Turkey, who had been in close contact with infected poultry.
Turkish newspapers said officials suspected the 14-year-old boy and his 15-year-old sister were infected by chickens they kept at home.
Tracing the source of the infection would be the job of the epidemiologists, Rodier said, adding their conclusions could be expected within the next five days.
The official said that the United Nations’ health agency had no reason yet to raise its global pandemic alert from the current three on a six-point scale.
For the WHO to move to level four, there would need to be evidence of human-to-human transmission, and there was none yet.
“From a distance it looks like we have no need to be concerned as it (the Turkish case) looks very like what happened in Asia, but let the investigators do their job,” Rodier said.