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Turkey free of bird flu: minister
5 April 2007 | 13:41 | FOCUS News Agency
Diyarbakir. Turkey has defeated a bird flu outbreak in the southeast and the country is now free of the disease, Agriculture Minister Mehdi Eker said Thursday.
"All quarantine measures are lifted as of today. There is no problem... and our country is now free of the disease," Eker told a press conference in Diyarbakir, the largest city of the mainly Kurdish southeast where the disease emerged in February, the Anatolia news agency reported.
The virus of the H5N1 strain, potentially deadly to humans, affected poultry in villages near Diyarbakir and in the neighboring province of Batman, AFP reports.
Hundreds of birds were culled and several people were tested for suspected infection, but all results were negative.
As a sidenote, the 5 children hospitalized last week under suspicion of bird flu were released, according to turkish media, on April 1st.
Declaring that any country is free of the disease means there have been no new outbreaks reported in the past 21 days.
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