The new case raised to 15 the number of patients currently under treatment as carriers of the lethal H5N1 virus and raising fresh alarms over its menacing westward advance.
Some 100 people were awaiting test results, including 10 from Istanbul, the country's business and tourism hub on the doorstep of Europe, where the presence of the disease among birds has already been confirmed, officials said.
Turkish laboratories identified four of the new cases as children from three northern provinces, confirming that the virus is steadily advancing from remote, rural eastern areas to the more urbanized west, with three H5N1 carriers already hospitalized in the capital Ankara.
The European Union sought to bolster its defences, announcing new import bans on six countries surrounding Turkey and confirming that EU experts were accompanying a World Health Organization (WHO) team currently assessing the situation in the worst-hit areas in the east.
Two children from the same family died in eastern Turkey last week after playing with sick chickens, becoming the first human fatalities outside the virus' eastern Asian origins. A third sibling also died but she tested negative for the bird flu virus.
Of the new cases, two siblings aged four and five, currently hospitalized in Ankara, have not yet shown any sign of illness, senior health ministry official Turan Buzgan told the Anatolia news agency.
A five-year-old boy from Corum, initially treated for pneumonia, was brought to the same hospital in Ankara and is now improving.
A 12-year-old is undergoing treatment in Samsun, on the Black Sea coast, Buzgan said.
The fifth patient, aged 18, was hospitalized in Van, where the three siblings perished last week and four other children infected with H5N1 are currently undergoing treatment.
As the emergency cull of fowl continued across the country, officials said the agriculture ministry was drafting legislation to ban outdoor poultry breeding, largely blamed for the spread of the virus, Anatolia reported.
Most of those infected come from impoverished rural areas, where people breed poultry in their homes and often take them indoors during the winter, providing ideal conditions for contamination.
Slaughtering was also set to begin in at least three neighborhoods on the outskirts of Istanbul, Governor Muammer Guler said, adding that city officials were awaiting the test results of 10 suspicious cases, with several hospitals put on alert.
Istanbul, a city of some 12 million people, is the westernmost point where the virus has been found since it resurfaced in Turkey last month after a first outbreak in the western province of Balikesir in October was successfully contained.
Health minister Recep Akdag has said there was no indication so far to suggest the disease is being transmitted between humans - a possibility scientists fear may spark a deadly global pandemic.
Currently, humans are believed to contract bird flu only through close contact with infected birds, but scientists fear millions could die if the virus mutates with human flu strains to become highly contagious.
A senior WHO scientist, Klaus Stoehr, said Sunday in Germany that the outbreak in Turkey did not mean increased risk for humans and blamed the spread on insufficient health controls in this vast country.
But Guenael Roidier, the head of a WHO delegation currently in eastern Turkey, said in Dogubeyazit that Turkish officials had handled the crisis well.
"They reacted rapidly... and their reaction was structured," he said. "The problem is the scope of this man-animal frontline - it must be reduced."
The authorities, already overwhelmed by the vast territory of contamination, were also having difficulties persuading people in impoverished rural areas of the scale of the threat.
Many families, reluctant to part with what are often their sole livelihoods and most precious belongings, were hiding their birds from slaughter teams.
Many people in the mainly Kurdish east are also illiterate and do not speak Turkish, further complicating efforts to raise their awareness.
© 2005 Agence France-Presse
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