ISLAMABAD, Dec 18: Pakistani authorities and World Health Organisation experts were trying to determine on Tuesday whether bird flu had passed from human to human after the country reported its first human death from the virus.

Pakistani health officials confirmed at the weekend that eight people had tested positive for the H5N1 bird flu virus in North West Frontier Province since late October, and one of the confirmed cases had died. A brother of the dead man, who had not been tested, also died. It was not yet clear if he was a victim of bird flu.

Ministry of Health spokesman Orya Maqbool Jan Abbasi said the first man to catch avian influenza had been working culling poultry. He recovered but the two men who died were his brothers.

But Abbasi and other health officials said there was no suggestion of human to human transmission. “Absolutely not,” said Health Secretary Khushnood Akhtar Lashari. “The WHO is looking into all the things but whatever we have at the moment there’s nothing to suggest that, remotely.”

Humans rarely contract H5N1, which is mainly an animal disease. Experts fear the strain could spark a global pandemic and kill millions of it mutates to a form that spreads more easily.

Lashari said the man who had been culling poultry might have inadvertently brought the virus back to his home, where his brothers fell sick. “He took his equipment along and the suspicion is the virus was in the equipment he was carrying,” Lashari said.” These are conjectures. It will be established when they do the sequencing test of the virus.”—Reuters