CAIRO, June 11 (Reuters) - A four-year-old girl has contracted the bird flu virus in southern Egypt, the 36th case among humans in the Arab world's most populous country, the Health Ministry said on Monday. Fifteen of Egypt's bird flu cases have proven fatal. Dina Ali Taghyan from Abu Diyab village in Qena province was admitted to hospital on Sunday with a high temperature, pneumonia and difficulty breathing, and had been exposed to birds suspected of having bird flu, the ministry said. She was taken to a hospital in the capital Cairo and is in a stable condition under treatment, it added in a statement. She is the second case in Egypt in two weeks after a lull of nearly two months. Egyptian officials had said they expected the virus to lie low during the hot summer, following the pattern it set last year after the initial outbreak in February 2006. The other recent case, a 10-year-old girl also from Qena, died in hospital on Saturday. Delays in reporting and diagnosing her infection may have contributed to her death. Bird flu did extensive damage to the country's poultry industry and the economy as a whole after its arrival in Egypt, which has more confirmed bird flu cases among humans than any other country outside of Asia. Most of those who have fallen ill in Egypt were reported to have had contact with sick or dead household birds, primarily in northern Egypt where the weather is cooler than in the south. But in a sign of a change in how the disease may be occurring in Egypt, all but two of the past 12 human cases have occurred in central or southern parts of the country. Around five million households in Egypt depend on poultry as a main source of food and income and the government has said this makes it unlikely the disease can be eradicated. The government still finds it hard to enforce restrictions on the movement and sale of live poultry.
