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Sumeyya Mamuk considered the chickens in her backyard to be beloved pets. The 8-year-old girl fed them, petted them and took care of them. When they started to get sick and die, she hugged them and tenderly kissed them goodbye.
The next morning, her face and eyes were swollen and she had a high fever. Her father took her to a hospital, and five days later she was confirmed to have the deadly H5N1 strain of bird flu.
"The chickens were sick. One had puffed up and she touched it. We told her not to. She loved chickens a lot," her father, Abdulkerim Mamuk, said of the second youngest of his eight children. "She held them in her arms."
Her oldest brother, Sadun, said Sumeyya loved animals and took care of puppies and kittens in Van's Yalim Erez neighborhood.
When her mother saw Sumeyya holding one of the dying chickens, she yelled at her and hit the girl to get her away.
Sumeyya began to cry. She wiped her tears with the hand she'd been using to comfort the dying chicken.
"She wiped her face," said her father, speaking in broken Turkish and wearing a leather jacket and a typical Kurdish headdress in their bright, clean home. "She started to swell. She had a really high fever."
Following a few tense days when her family worried if she would recover, Sumeyya's condition has improved due to quick treatment with the antiviral drug Tamiflu, said Dr. Huseyin Avni Sahin, chief physician at the Van 100th Year Hospital.
But at least two other children have died of the same virus in Turkey, and as of Tuesday, 15 people had tested positive for infection in preliminary tests. Many are children.
The Ministry of Health in Belgium announced a person coming from Turkey was hospitalized suspected of suffering from bird flu.
Preliminary tests direct the patient having high fever and bird flu symptoms Friday night was hospitalized at Saint Pierre hospital in the capital Brussels.
The first step was to conduct test, the results of which will be directed to the relevant government ministries.
Health Minister Rudy Demotte will announce the test results on Saturday evening.
Some sources claim the person is a Turkish-origin journalist returning from the reporting in the region where bird flu cases have been reported. This individual is working for a Belgian press organ, it has been suggested
...and the news does not get any better: Bird flu samples show new mutation
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Samples taken from two of the bird flu victims in Turkey have doctors concerned, as an analysis of the sample shows a change in one gene in one of the two samples tested. World Health Organisation (WHO) has said, however, that it is too early to tell whether this means the deadly strain of the virus has mutated into a form passable from human to human. The mutation, which allows the virus to bind to a human cell more easily than to a bird cell, is a shift in the direction of the virus being able to infect people more easily than it does now, reported AP.
“We assume this could be one small step in the virus' attempt to adapt to humans,” WHO virologist Mike Perdue said on Thursday. “But it's seen only in one isolated case and it's difficult to make sweeping conclusions. We just have to wait and see what the rest of the viruses (from Turkey) look like.”
The number of people confirmed with the deadly H5N1 strain has risen from 15 to 18, according to Turkish health authorities on Thursday.
All victims to date are said to have had close contact with infected poultry.
A laboratory in London is now analyzing the samples from Turkey, to try and understand how the virus is spreading.
“If we saw it in more than 50% of samples, it would suggest the virus is really trying to adapt to humans and it would be problematic,” Perdue said.
Girl Gets Bird Flu After Kissing Chicken
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