Egyptian health officials are trying hard to enforce preventive measures amid an increasing number of human infections with bird flu.

The State Information Service announced that a 16-year-old girl died of bird flu on Thursday, the third fatal human case of the deadly disease.

Earlier, Egypt announced that a total of 11 people had been infected with the disease in the country.

Egypt reported its first fatal human bird flu case on March 18 and the second on March 27, both of whom were women.

Egypt found its first outbreak of bird flu in poultry on Feb. 17. Soon afterward, the government has taken tough measures to curb the spread of the fatal disease.

Deputy Chairman of the General Authority for Veterinary Services Ahmed Tawfiq said the Ministry of Agriculture had a plan to manage the crisis long before the detection of the first case.

In coordination with all the departments concerned, committees were formed and operation rooms set up across the country, he added.

Veterinary doctors have been provided with proper training and more than 5,000 specimens have been checked since October 2005 for H5N1, the bird flu virus.

However, Tawfiq stressed that overcoming the current crisis requires cooperation between the government and poultry producers, adding that citizens and media must work together on this.

Mukhtar el-Sherif, an economist, said the poultry industry used to provide Egyptian with 60 percent of protein they needed, although only 20 percent of the birds were killed in modern slaughterhouses and stored in their refrigerators.

He called for setting up a holding company and securing a large budget to address the problems the poultry industry met in the bird flu crisis.

The Ministry of Agriculture said the government will provide the industry with all the support it needs, including paying around five Egyptian pounds, less than one U.S. dollar, for every slaughtered bird.

Experts said Egypt needs to do much more to overcome the crisis, and they believed the country will control the difficult situation at the moment.

Egypt, the most populous country in the Arab world, is on a major route for migratory birds, at the crossroads between Asia and Africa.

The deadly H5N1 strain has killed over 100 people worldwide since its latest outbreak in southeast Asia in late 2003, according to the World Health Organization.

Most victims were infected after close contact with sick birds.

The virus currently can only jump from birds to humans, but scientists fear that it could mutate into a form capable of passing easily among humans and thus spark a global pandemic.

Source: Xinhua