Iraq Confirms Second Bird Flu Death
As if the beleaguered Iraqis don't have enough problems, now this...A second Iraqi Kurd has been confirmed 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 said on Monday. A few days after Abdullah's death, the World Health Organisation (WHO) lab confirmed his niece Shajin Abdel Qader had died of bird flu, galvanising an international response. Earlier on 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.
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