Four Bangladeshi laborers working on official poultry culling teams in Kuwait returned preliminary positive results for bird flu in April 2007, according to a medical source who spoke on condition of anonymity. If confirmed, the cases would be the first human H5N1 infections recorded in any Arab Gulf state.
The men were admitted to Kuwait's infectious diseases hospital on a Tuesday after developing flu-like symptoms and placed in an isolation ward. Authorities collected blood samples for a second round of testing and dispatched specimens to a World Health Organization reference laboratory in Egypt for a final determination. Health ministry officials said a formal statement would follow once results were reviewed.
The four had been assigned to culling operations in Wafra, a farming area near the Saudi border south of Kuwait City. Since an H5N1 outbreak was confirmed in February 2007, the country had destroyed roughly 1.7 million birds, mostly egg-laying chickens across four commercial farms, with 106 cases recorded in poultry. Kuwait's first infected bird, a flamingo at a coastal villa, was identified in November 2005.
H5N1 had killed 170 people globally by that point, according to the WHO, and was considered a pandemic risk given its potential to adapt into a form that spreads between humans.
Historical summary. TurkishPress restated this wire report, first published in April 2007, in its own words.