ANKARA, Jan 16: A Turkish hospital was battling on Monday to save a small boy stricken with bird flu, a day after his sister perished, as doctors warned people in the flu-plagued country that the belated search for medical help was proving fatal.

As officials from half the world’s nations braced for a meeting in Beijing to raise funds to tackle a possible global pandemic, an Israeli hospital was testing a man showing flu symptoms, while Indonesian labs detected the deadly virus in samples from a teenager who died over the weekend.

In a university hospital in the eastern Turkish city of Van, five-year-old Mohammed Ozcan, the 19th carrier of the lethal H5N1 strain of bird flu in the country, remained in serious condition, doctors said.

The boy has been described as the most worrisome case among the four H5N1 carriers, all of them children, currently undergoing treatment in the hospital.

Chief physician Huseyin Avni Sahin told AFP that the boy did not yet need the support of a respiratory machine, and later told Anatolia news agency he was showing some signs of improvement.

Mohammed’s teenage sister Fatma died in the same hospital on Sunday, and even though initial tests did not detect H5N1 in her samples, she was strongly suspected of having been infected.—AFP