Local authorities in northern Iraq, meanwhile, have culled half a million birds in the border areas with Turkey and Iran.

"We are suffering from a lack of medicine to combat the virus," Tahseen Nameq, head of a joint Kurdish committee set up to combat the spread of the disease, told AFP.

"We have received only 50 pills of Tamiflu," or just medicine for five cases, he said.

Health Minister Abdel Mutalib Mohammed Ali said the government was mobilizing to contain the crisis.

"We are going to meet all of Kurdistan's needs because we want to control the situation and we are convinced we can," he said at a press conference in Sulaimaniyah, adding that five mobile hospitals had been sent to the three Kurdish provinces.

The World Health Organization announced on Tuesday it was sending a team of five specialists to northern Iraq to investigate the situation. The group is expected to arrive in Kurdistan by the end of the week.

Iraqi Kurdistan has quarantined 14 people suspected of suffering from bird flu, but officials say that other than the fatality, only one other case is suspected to be the H5N1 deadly strain.

Agriculture Minister Ali al-Bahadli said Monday that the government was equipped to confront the crisis.

"We have a lot of capacity to confront the disease and have antiseptic and medical equipment to prevent people from being infected by bird flu and we have sources from where we can obtain more," he said.

An emergency plan was ready for implementation in any region of Iraq to avoid the spread of the disease, he said.

Nameq said a massive programme has been launched to cull birds in Kurdistan, in border regions north of Sulaimaniyah near Lake Dukan, in Raniya and also north of Arbil.

"So far we have killed 500,000 birds. In some of these areas we have killed 50 percent of all birds and in others only 30 percent," Nameq said.

Shamal Abdel Wafa, the head of the Kurdish agriculture department, said at the Sulaimaniyah press conference that 100 teams began work three days ago to cull all birds in designated areas.

Iraq on Monday said a teenage girl from Raniya region who died earlier this month had succumbed to H5N1 despite initial reports from a World Health Organization laboratory in Amman saying test results for the virus were negative.

Mohammed Khushnow, a senior health official in Sulaimaniyah, said on Monday there were 14 cases of suspected bird flu in the region.

The dead girl's uncle also died last week after suffering a pulmonary infection and samples are being tested in Amman.

The main suspected case left is 54-year-old Mariam Qadar, who hails from the same region as the two fatalities and was taken to hospital in Sulaimaniyah by her family last Wednesday.

Turkey, which has 21 cases of the flu, had previously been the only country outside Asia to report fatalities from the virus. Four people have died there.