OCCUPIED JERUSALEM, January 16, 2006 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) - A man from Al-Quds (occupied East Jerusalem) was undergoing urgent tests on Monday, January 16, for possible bird flu after a number of chickens he was keeping died, an Israeli hospital spokesman said.

"Last night, a man came into the emergency room suffering from flu symptoms," Hadassah hospital spokesman Ron Krumer told Agence France-Presse (AFP), saying several of the man's chickens had recently died from unknown causes.

"He was isolated and is undergoing tests to diagnose if the symptoms are bird flu."

Krumer said the tests were "a precautionary measure" and would take several hours to be completed.

The patient, a 50-year-old man, comes from Sur Baher village in Al-Quds, which was occupied and annexed by Israel in 1967.

Amid fears that the infection could be confirmed, West Jerusalem mayor Uri Lupoliansky ordered the man's chicken coop to be immediately quarantined and the remaining live fowl to be examined by the municipality's veterinary service, Israeli public radio reported.

Israel's health ministry has been on alert since three people died in Turkey after contracting the lethal H5N1 strain of bird flu.

Until now, no bird found to be carrying the virus has been discovered in Israel, the ministry said.

The killer flu is still claiming lives; the latest is a 13-year-old Indonesian girl, whose siblings have also tested positive for the H5N1 virus, a health ministry official said on Monday, citing the results of local tests.

"We found three positive bird flu cases in one family coming from Indramayu, West Java," Hariadi Wibisono, the ministry's director of control of animal-borne diseases, told Reuters.

He said this was Indonesia's fifth cluster of bird flu cases, where people living in close proximity had fallen ill.

There was no evidence of human-to-human transmission and dead chickens had been found in the neighborhood, he added.

The H5N1 virus is not known to pass easily between humans at the moment, but experts fear it could develop that ability and set off a global pandemic that might kill millions of people.

If confirmed by outside laboratories recognized by the World Health Organization (WHO), the latest cases would take total known deaths in Indonesia from avian flu to 13 and the number who have had bird flu to 20.

The highly pathogenic strain of bird flu is endemic in poultry in parts of Asia, and has affected birds in two-thirds of the provinces in Indonesia, an archipelago of about 17,000 islands and 220 million people.

The country has millions of chickens and ducks, many in the yards of rural and urban homes, raising the risk of more humans becoming infected with a virus that is confirmed to have killed 79 people in six countries since late 2003.

A six-year-old Turkish boy sits on his bed in hospital where he is being treated for suspected bird flu. (Reuters).

Turkey on Monday extended the culling of poultry across the country after a girl died from suspected bird flu and her brother was diagnosed with the deadly H5N1 virus.

The Health Ministry said initial tests on 12-year-old Fatma Ozcan, who may have died of bird flu on Sunday, were negative but doctors suspect she did in fact contract the disease.

Her brother Mohammet was in critical condition in Van, the province worst hit by the outbreak that has swept Turkey since late December. If Fatma is confirmed to have died from the virus, it would bring the number of human cases in Turkey to 20.

Three children have already died from avian flu in Turkey, the first human victims reported outside east Asia since H5N1 reemerged in 2003.

The potentially deadly virus has been found in wild birds and poultry over a third of Turkey, especially in villages reaching from Istanbul at Europe's gates to Van near the Iranian and Iraqi borders.

Neighboring countries have expressed concern the virus might spread to their poultry flocks.

Syria on Sunday, January 15, destroyed birds at a market near its northeastern border with Turkey to try to head off any spread of bird flu.

The Turkish government has set up a committee to help the $3 billion Turkish poultry sector.

Bird flu in Turkey comes as the country recovers from a 2001 financial crisis. The crisis was followed by three years of high growth that has averaged 8 percent and a dramatic decline in inflation that had long plagued the economy.