Azeri avian flu victims had contact with sick birds

BAKU, Mar 14 (Reuters) Three people in Azerbaijan who have died from suspected bird flu fell ill after contact with sick birds and were not thought to have infected each other, health officials said today.

The Health Ministry said overnight that laboratory tests showed the three, who died this month, had the disease. The World Health Organisation (WHO) said it was treating the cases as bird flu, although it was awaiting further tests in Britain.

''The (deceased) fell ill as a result of contact with birds,'' said Shyakar Babayeva, head nurse at the Lung Disease Research Institute in the capital, Baku, where they were treated.

''I do not believe the virus passed from human to human,'' she told Reuters.

The WHO has previously confirmed 98 deaths from bird flu in Asia and the Middle East.

Victims contract the virus through close contact with infected poultry, but the fear is that the virus could mutate to be easily passed between humans, leading to a pandemic in which millions could die.

There have been no previous cases of bird flu in people in Azerbaijan, a small state on the Caspian Sea sandwiched between Russia and Iran. The country is an eastern neighbour of Turkey, where four children died from bird flu in January.

The three victims were from a village in the Salyan region, in the south of the country near the Caspian Sea coast.

Details were sketchy, but local media said two of them were teenagers, a girl of 17 and a boy aged 16. It was not clear if all three victims came from the same family.

Local media also quoted residents as saying there had been mass deaths of birds in the area and that the infected people kept domestic poultry at their home.

''All three dead were infected with bird flu from birds,'' said an official with the WHO office in Azerbaijan, who did not want to be identified. He added that the three had been treated with the Tamiflu antiviral drug.

The WHO official said a member of the agency's team had gone to the dead people's home village today.

''(He) has gone to Salyan region to conduct monitoring, and familiarise himself with measures being undertaken to control the spread of the disease,'' said the official.

Azerbaijan confirmed its first case of bird flu in migratory birds at the start of February. Dead birds on the Ansheron peninsula near Baku and in the Massala region, near Iran, were found to have the deadly H5N1 strain of the disease.

Ecology Minister Hussein Bagirov said veterinary workers were still finding dead wild birds. But he said the numbers had fallen from a peak earlier this year of up to 1,000 a day to between 60 and 70 a day birds now.

REUTERS SI PM1922