Tijan Abdel Qader, 14, died on Tuesday in Suleimaniyah after falling sick a fortnight earlier, said Tahseen Nameq, the deputy to the chief agricultural official of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, the party administering the city.

"After she died, we did another test and we didn't find any bird flu," he said, adding that tissue samples were sent to Jordan to be tested for virus H5N1 just to be sure.

The girl's family remains healthy and uninfected and suspects she was actually suffering from pneumonia, he added.

Abdel Qader came from the town of Raniya in northern Kurdistan, close to the Turkish and Iranian borders.

Turkey, which has 21 cases of the flu, is the only country outside the Far East that has reported fatalities from the virus.

Health officials in Iraq's three Kurdish provinces, which border Turkey, say a number of measures are being taken to stop the spread of the virus. These include decontaminating trucks crossing the border, banning the import of Turkish poultry and prohibiting the sale of live chickens inside Kurdistan.

There is also a major public awareness campaign urging people to take precautions, including cooking instructions to minimize the risk of infection.

Iraq's Kurdish provinces are a major poultry producing region supplying chickens and eggs for much of the rest of the country.

Scientists fear that the more the virus spreads, the greater the chance H5N1 will mutate into a form that is easily transmissible between humans. This could spark a global pandemic that could claim millions of lives.

The toll from the deadly H5N1 strain of bird flu has climbed to 78 people worldwide.