German health officials were examining two women on Monday night suspected of having contracted the deadly bird flu disease.
If confirmed, the infections would be the first in Europe and the latest in an outbreak which has so far killed 12 people and spread across 10 Asian countries.
Last night, however, Germany’s main public health institute urged caution and said it was unlikely but not impossible the women had contracted the killer virus.
The ambulance service in the northern port city of Hamburg confirmed it had taken a female holidaymaker, who had just returned to Germany from Thailand, to the Bernhard Nocht institute for tropical medicine for checks. The woman’s companion had also been admitted to hospital, it added.
The woman complained of nausea, dizziness and fever soon after flying back from Thailand on Saturday, the hospital said.
Last night its director, Bernhard Fleischer, said it was too soon to say whether the woman had bird flu.
”There are many reasons to have a fever when you come back from Asia,” he pointed out. Results from tests on the women would be known later today, he added.
Last night a spokesperson for Germany’s main public health institute, the Robert Koch institute in Berlin, said it was ”very unlikely” the woman had the disease. She added, however: ”Unlikely does not mean impossible.”
The new suspected cases in Germany came as it emerged that two more people, one in Thailand and one in Vietnam, had died from bird flu, bringing the known death toll to 12.
The United Nations said on Monday that the virus was still out of control, especially in Thailand, Vietnam and China, with the Chinese now reporting cases in chickens in the remote north-western Xinjiang province.
So far there are at least 18 people in Thailand suspected of having bird flu, 10 of whom have died. Three UN organisations, the World Health Organisation (WHO), the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and the World Organisation for Animal Health, are meeting in Bangkok on Tuesday to discuss the progress in fighting the virus.
The FAO estimates about 45-million birds have died or been culled across the 10 infected Asian countries, although data from individual governments suggest the figure could be much higher.
The WHO expressed cautious optimism on Monday, suggesting the current H5N1 strain of bird flu was unlikely to jump to humans on a large scale.
”The initial information we have is it is a purely avian virus,” said Bjorn Melgaard, WHO representative in Thailand. ”It’s not very efficient in terms of infecting humans.”
However, he warned of the potential remained for it to mutate into a more deadly strain. — Guardian Unlimited Â