French woman suspected of having bird flu

Doctors suspect a French woman who recently returned from Turkey could have contracted bird flu, the Health Ministry reported today.

The 32-year-old woman is in hospital in Montpellier in southern France, a ministry statement said. She has been tested for signs of the deadly H5N1 strain of bird flu in her nose and throat, and the results are expected later today.

It was the first time the ministry announced a case of suspected bird flu in European France. Last year three people on France’s Indian Ocean island of Reunion were thought to have been infected with the H5N1 strain, but the suspicions proved unfounded.

The woman in the latest case was taken to hospital on Saturday for flu-like symptoms with respiratory problems, the ministry statement said. She had been travelling alone in Tarsus on Turkey’s Mediterranean Coast.

Given the symptoms and her travel history, the National Institute for Sanitary Monitoring declared it to be a case of suspected bird flu, in accordance with the government’s recent anti-bird flu program.

Twenty-one people have tested positive for H5N1 in Turkey and four children have died. Turkey has reported possible H5N1 outbreaks in poultry in 26 provinces.

The virus has a limited ability to jump from poultry to people, and there is no evidence yet to suggest it can spread from human to human, although experts fear the virus could mutate into a form spread easily among humans and trigger a pandemic. It has killed at least 79 people in east Asia and Turkey since 2003.