LAGOS, Nigeria - Bird flu has claimed its first human victim in Africa's most-populous country, killing a young Nigerian woman due to graduate from university and be married this year, officials and the victim's fiance said Wednesday.
The Jan. 17 death in Lagos, a teeming city where chickens and other fowl are raised in close quarters with humans, is an ominous development in a country with poor health care and little government presence in remote areas.
The victim, whose name was not released by the Information Ministry, was finishing her accounting degree and got engaged last month, her fiance told The Associated Press.
"She was a young girl, full of life, looking forward to this year,'' said the fiance, who asked not to be named so that his loved one's family could grieve in peace.
"For the last two weeks, I've been lost,'' the 25-year-old financial consultant said. "If they find a cure, I hope they name it after her.''
Another woman, a member of the dead woman's household, was also infected, Information Minister Frank Nweke said, but she was responding to treatment.
Nigeria's top bird flu expert, Abdullahi Nasidi, said there may be more cases, including deaths.
An outbreak of the deadly H5N1 bird flu hit Nigeria last year, but no human infections had been reported until Wednesday. Before the case in Nigeria, the only African countries with confirmed infections among people were Egypt and Djibouti. Eleven people have died in Egypt.
The H5N1 virus is difficult for humans to catch, but health experts fear it may mutate into a form that could spread easily among humans and possibly kill millions. The H5N1 virus has claimed the lives of at least 164 people worldwide since it appeared in Asian poultry in late 2003, according to the World Health Organization.
Nigeria lacks the sophisticated laboratory facilities to determine exactly which of the many bird flu subtypes killed the Nigerian woman. Samples taken from the infected women have been forwarded to a lab affiliated with the World Health Organization for further testing, Nweke said.
The H5N1 strain has been confirmed among birds in 15 of Nigeria's 36 states. International health officials said local health workers will be looking for signs of human-to-human transmission.
"From a public health point of view, it would be most important to follow up H5N1 cases to see if there are any chains of transmission,'' said Gregory Hartl, a World Health Organization spokesman in Geneva.
"H5N1 is an animal disease, but as long as it is widespread in poultry, we can expect to see sporadic cases in humans, as we have in Vietnam, Indonesia, and other countries,'' he said.
