China has confirmed that a 29-year-old woman in Shanghai has died of bird flu.
Chinese officials have stepped up measures to monitor patients reporting fever after the woman, a migrant worker, died of the disease.
In the Middle East, Jordan has announced its first cases of the H5N1 strain of bird flu, and chickens on a second farm in the Gaza Strip have been found with the deadly strain.
Jordan’s health minister said Friday that several dead turkeys on a farm north of the capital, Amman, tested positive for the disease.
In the Gaza Strip, farmers are demonstrating after the Palestinian Authority told them there would be no compensation for destroyed birds.
Israel’s Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni appealed Friday to United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan to help Palestinians fight bird flu. Israeli officials have expressed fear that the deadly H5N1 strain will spread from Gaza into Israel.
Israel has destroyed one million chickens after discovering the disease in poultry last week. The deadly form of bird flu also has been found in Iraq, Turkey and Egypt, as well as several regions of Asia.
The woman who died in Shanghai is the first death from bird flu in that city. Most of China’s previous cases have been in rural areas.
Elsewhere, Cambodian officials say tests show that a three-year-old girl died of the disease. Health Ministry officials say the girl, from a region south of Phnom Penh, had been playing with sick fowl.
The deadly form of bird flu has killed more than 100 people since 2003, mostly in East Asia.
Experts worry that the virus will mutate and eventually spread from person to person, fueling a global pandemic.
-VOA News
