Second Turkish teenager dies from bird flu

ISTANBUL (Reuters) - A second Turkish teenager from the same family died from bird flu on Thursday, officials and doctors said, in the first human cases of the disease outside China and Southeast Asia.
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Although not definitively confirmed as the H5N1 strain of bird flu, the deaths appear to mark a major shift westwards to the edge of Europe of a disease which has killed 74 people in eastern Asia since 2003.

The dead children came from a remote rural district near the Armenian border where people live, as in the affected areas of the Far East, in close proximity with livestock and poultry, which they mostly raise for their own consumption.

"We lost Fatma Kocyigit this morning," Niyazi Tanilir, governor in the eastern province of Van, said on the CNN Turk news channel. The 15-year-old girl died in hospital at around 6:30 a.m. (0430 GMT).

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