GENEVA, Feb 2: An Iraqi teenager who died last month had the H5N1 bird flu virus, the World Health Organisation (WHO) confirmed on Thursday, meaning the disease has now killed people in seven countries as it spreads across the globe.

The WHO said there was an urgent need to establish the severity of the outbreak among birds in Iraq.

The latest victim was a teenage girl who died of severe respiratory disease in hospital in the city of Sulaimaniya in northern Iraq on Jan 17.

“Test results have now confirmed her infection,” the WHO said in a statement after tests at a British laboratory.

Specimens from her uncle, who died 10 days later, were on their way to the laboratory along with those of a 54-year-old woman under treatment for respiratory illness.

Two more people, also in the Sulaimaniya area, had ‘symptoms suggestive of H5N1 infection’, the WHO said.

The largely autonomous northern Iraqi region of Kurdistan, where the girl lived, is near areas frequented by migratory birds and not far from the border with Turkey where four children have died from bird flu.

The H5N1 virus has now claimed 86 lives among 161 known cases since re-emerging in Asia in late 2003.

Victims currently contract it through close contact with infected birds. However, experts fear the virus could mutate to spread easily between humans and spark a pandemic that could kill millions.

UN TEAMS: The United Nations health agency praised local doctors for their awareness of the clinical features of the disease and good public health vigilance. Poultry culling was also under way in the region in an attempt to halt the spread of the disease.