Iraq Confirms Second Death In Bird Flu Alert

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 Sulaimani province where the dead girl lived.