Girl Gets Bird Flu After Kissing Chicken By BENJAMIN HARVEY, Associated Press Writer

VAN, Turkey Sumeyya Mamuk considered the chickens in her backyard to be beloved pets. The 8-year-old girl fed them, petted them and took care of them. When they started to get sick and die, she hugged them and tenderly kissed them goodbye. The next morning, her face and eyes were swollen and she had a high fever. Her father took her to a hospital, and five days later she was confirmed to have the deadly H5N1 strain of bird flu. “The chickens were sick. One had puffed up and she touched it. We told her not to. She loved chickens a lot,” her father, Abdulkerim Mamuk, said of the second youngest of his eight children. “She held them in her arms.” Her oldest brother, Sadun, said Sumeyya loved animals and took care of puppies and kittens in Van’s Yalim Erez neighborhood. When her mother saw Sumeyya holding one of the dying chickens, she yelled at her and hit the girl to get her away. Sumeyya began to cry. She wiped her tears with the hand she’d been using to comfort the dying chicken. “She wiped her face,” said her father, speaking in broken Turkish and wearing a leather jacket and a typical Kurdish headdress in their bright, clean home. “She started to swell. She had a really high fever.” Following a few tense days when her family worried if she would recover, Summeya’s condition has improved due to quick treatment with the antiviral drug Tamiflu, said Dr. Huseyin Avni Sahin, chief physician at the Van 100th Year Hospital. But at least two other children have died of the same virus in Turkey, and as of Tuesday, 15 people had tested positive for infection in preliminary tests.