KUWAIT CITY, 6 April 2007 — Four Bangladeshi workers who had initially tested positive for bird flu in Kuwait have been cleared of the disease after further tests, the Kuwaiti health minister said yesterday.
“We are happy to declare that the results of the tests ... in the referenced laboratory in Egypt have been negative,” Minister of Health Maasouma Al-Mubarak told reporters after the latest tests by the World Health Organization.
On Wednesday, the four workers who had been culling infected chickens in Kuwait were tested positive in preliminary tests, but the Ministry of Health sent specimens to the WHO reference laboratory in Egypt for confirmation.
They would have been the first cases of bird flu affecting humans in the Gulf, had the cases been confirmed.
The four workers were admitted to Kuwait’s infectious diseases hospital with flu-like symptoms on Tuesday.
