UN agency thinks bird flu killed three Azeris

GENEVA, Mar 14 (Reuters) The World Health Organisation (WHO) today said it believed test results showing three people in Azerbaijan had died of bird flu were reliable, but it awaited final confirmation from a British laboratory.

Azerbaijan's Health Ministry said late yesterday that three people who died earlier this month had been infected with bird flu in the former Soviet state's first human cases.

The results came from a mobile laboratory brought into Azerbaijan from the US Naval Medical Research Unit in Cairo, WHO spokesman Dick Thompson said. The tests were positive for H5 avian flu, but the exact strain of the virus was not yet known.

''We are proceeding as if it is H5N1...We are sending an epidemiologist and clinician right away and are looking at possibly a largely response,'' Thompson told Reuters.

While it remains mostly a disease of poultry, bird flu can occasionally infect humans and has previously killed at least 98 people in seven countries in Asia and the West Asia.

Scientists fear it is only a matter of time before the virulent virus mutates into a form that passes easily among people, triggering a pandemic which could kill millions.

Azerbaijan is located on the Caspian Sea, sandwiched between Russia and Iran. It also shares a border with Turkey where four children died from bird flu in January.

The United Nations health agency hoped that the samples would leave the capital Baku today or tomorrow.

The infected people were thought to be members of a family from the Salyan region, in southern Azerbaijan near the Caspian Sea coast, who were admitted to hospital early in March with suspected bird flu. Four of them died.

Azeri officials said a further six people from the same area who were in hospital with suspected bird flu were not infected.

Relatives told local media that the infected family kept poultry in their house, a common practice in rural Azerbaijan.

''We don't have enough information on the means of infection. The investigation is still ongoing,'' Thompson said. ''There are no reports of bird die-offs in this area.'' A small WHO team went to Azerbaijan to assess needs and provide technical support after an outbreak in neighbouring Turkey in January. It will now be expanded, Thompson said.

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

Reuters SI BD1610