Avian Flu: The death toll of victims of bird flu rose to 12 yesterday in an epidemic sweeping Asia, but in Europe, German health officials said they doubted two women tested for the virus had contracted the disease.
Scientists fear the virus may now be transmitted from person to person.
The head of the World Health Organisation (WHO) said China was mobilising to fight the flu as if it were the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) outbreak which killed nearly 800 people last year.
Two more deaths - a 58 year-old-woman in Thailand and a teenage boy in Vietnam - came a day after the WHO said two sisters who died in Vietnam last month probably caught the virus from their brother, the first cases of human-to-human infection in the current epidemic.
The brother also died, but he was cremated before any autopsy could determine if he was the original source. His wife also contracted bird flu but has since recovered.
In Hamburg, Germany, health authorities yesterday carried out tests on two women for possible bird flu infection, though officials said they were very unlikely to have the disease.
"There is nothing to suggest it is bird flu," Prof Bernhard Fleischer, director of the Bernhard Nocht Institute for Tropical Medicine in Hamburg, told reporters after receiving the first results of clinical tests. The institute said final test results would be due today.