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Bird flu claims 3rd Turkish child

People carry the coffin of a 15-year-old girl who died of bird flu.

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ANKARA, Turkey (CNN) -- An 11-year-old girl died of bird flu in Turkey on Friday, the country's third death from the virus, officials said.

Hulya Kocyigit is the sister of two teenagers who died earlier this week of the virus. Mehmet Ali Kocyigit, 14, died of a strain of avian influenza on Sunday, and Fatma Kocyigit, 15, died Thursday.

The children lived in a remote rural district of eastern Turkey near the Armenian border. Their six-year-old brother is also being treated for the same disease in the hospital.

Huseyin Avni Sahin, the head doctor at Van hospital where the children died, told CNN Turk 23 people were now being treated at his hospital for suspected bird flu.

World Health Organization (WHO) spokeswoman Maria Cheng told CNN the group has confirmed that the two teenagers had an H5 variety of the avian influenza, but said it is not yet known if it was the deadly H5N1 strain.

The hospital said Friday that they believe the latest death is also from the H5N1 strain, and samples have been sent to Britain for testing.

Cheng said she would not be surprised if the results do come back showing it was the H5N1 strain, because that virus has been found in birds in that region.

WHO is sending a team to Turkey to investigate the outbreak, Cheng said.

Dr. Sahin said the children's family reported that some of their chickens began dying late last year, and that the family cooked the remaining chickens for dinner.

He told The Associated Press that the fact that the family had been late in seeking treatment had contributed to the deaths.

The doctor said the youngsters most likely contracted the virus while playing with the heads of dead chickens infected with the disease. The children had reportedly tossed the chicken heads like balls inside their house in Dogubayazit, near the Iranian border.

"They played with the heads for days," Sahin said. "They were in very, very close contact with the dead chickens."

The siblings would be the first known human deaths from the strain outside of China and Southeast Asia. In Turkey, suspected outbreaks have been reported in five towns.

Professor Colin Blakemore, chief executive of Britain's Medical Research Council, said one cause for concern was that the girl who died had been treated with the anti-bird flu drug Tamiflu -- though she had not been given it until the late stages of the disease.

There was however no need for panic, he said.

In four Turkish towns, including Van, culling operations were underway, with thousands of birds being destroyed.

In the dead children's home, Dogubayazit, near the Iranian and Armenian borders, an anxious crowd gathered outside the state agricultural offices to dump sackfuls of dead poultry or to ask for their poultry to be culled, Reuters reported.

"After the deaths everybody is scared. We are all getting rid of our chickens and nobody dares eat their meat," said local trader Devlet Kaya.

Agriculture officials wearing face masks and protective white suits carried the sacks away to be culled and dumped in the municipal rubbish tip outside the town, where they are buried in a deep pit and covered with lime.

Culling

One official said 3,500 poultry had been culled in the district so far and this figure was expected to reach 5,000 by the time the operation was completed on Saturday.

However, officials said some families were trying to conceal some of their poultry.

Rauf Ulusoy, the state's representative in the town, told Reuters 14 people had been sent from the town for treatment in neighboring Van since the outbreak first emerged at the end of December.

He said the authorities had prepared a leaflet for locals detailing the precautionary measures which they should take against the spread of bird flu and this was being distributed in the town.

Authorities have sent extra supplies of the Tamiflu medicine used against the disease to Van, which is about 800 km (500 miles) east of the capital Ankara.

The WHO, which had been expecting human cases after the virus was first detected among wild birds and poultry in Turkey and parts of southeast Europe late last year, said the latest cases did not mean a worldwide flu pandemic had become more likely.

According to the WHO, 142 cases of bird flu have been reported worldwide, with 74 of those patients dying.

All of the previous deaths have been in China and Southeast Asia, and world health officials have feared the spread of the disease to Europe from migratory birds flocking to the region, or from transport of domestic birds.

Most of those cases have been spread through bird-to-human contact and not human-to-human. However, there are a few cases in which the virus is believed to have spread from human to human.

Health officials have said they fear the virus could eventually mutate and spread rapidly from human to human, causing a worldwide pandemic.

CNN's Kaya Heyse contributed to this story.