(Reuters)
Updated: 2006-03-14 08:32

BAKU - Azerbaijan said on Monday bird flu had killed three people, in the country's first known cases in humans.

Azerbaijan is a neighbor of eastern Turkey, which has had several human deaths from bird flu. The country also borders Russia, Iran, Georgia and Armenia.

An Afghan woman (C) sells chicken on a street in Kabul, Afghanistan on March 13, 2006. The H5 type of bird flu has been found in five birds in Afghanistan but the sub-type of the virus is not yet known, the government and the United Nations said on Monday. [Reuters]

The infected people were thought to be members of a family from the Salyan region in southern Azerbaijan who died in hospital this month. They had kept poultry in their house, a common practice in rural Azerbaijan.

"Initial analysis from the laboratory shows that the three people who had died did so as a result of bird flu," said Health Ministry spokeswoman Samaya Mamedova.

The results came from a mobile laboratory brought into the country from Cairo on Monday. There was no word on results of tests on samples Azerbaijan sent to a laboratory in Britain approved by the World Health Organization (WHO).

WHO said on Monday the virus had killed at least 98 people worldwide since late 2003, confirming that a girl in Indonesia was the 22nd killed by the virus there.

The girl, aged 12, died on March 1. Her 10-year-old brother died the previous day after being diagnosed with dengue haemorrhagic fever, a mosquito-borne virus, the WHO said, adding it would never be known if he was also infected with H5N1.

Bird flu had been found in chickens in the children's household. Human victims of H5N1 contract the virus through direct contact with infected birds.

However, there are fears the virus could eventually mutate into a form that passes easily from person to person, sparking a pandemic that could kill millions and cripple the world economy.

"If the pandemic is severe, the economic impact is likely to be significant, though predictions are subject to a high degree of uncertainty," the International Monetary Fund said on Monday.

In a matter of weeks, H5N1 has spread deep into Europe, taken hold in Africa and flared anew in Asia.

GLOBAL FIGHT

Myanmar has reported what is believed to be the secretive country's first case, after 112 chickens died on a farm near Mandalay, about 430 miles north of Yangon.

Myanmar is seen by some international health experts as a potential black hole in the global fight against the disease but a U.N. official in Yangon said authorities were cooperating.

In impoverished Afghanistan, the government and the United Nations said the H5 subtype of the bird flu virus had been found in a small number of poultry and there was a high risk it was the deadly H5N1 strain.

Cameroon on Sunday became the fourth African country to report an outbreak in poultry, joining Nigeria, Egypt and Niger.

Wild birds were the most likely carriers of the strain to Cameroon, the country's livestock minister said on Monday.

So far, there has been no human bird flu case in Africa, but health officials fear its spread in birds across the continent, where millions live in close contact with poultry, increases the chances of it mutating to become transmissible between humans.

Experts are also concerned that the world's poorest continent, already battling HIV/ AIDS and malaria, is ill-equipped to combat the new health threat.

Suspected poultry outbreaks in Gabon, which borders Cameroon to the north, Ethiopia, Gambia and Sierra Leone are under investigation.

German authorities said on Monday a suspected outbreak in a Bavarian poultry farm had turned out to be a false alarm, after dead ducks tested negative for H5N1.