Health authorities in Germany said that a woman suspected to have contracted bird flu did not in fact have the potentially fatal disease.

"We are nearly sure that this is human influenza virus," a spokeswoman for the Bernhard Nocht Institute for Tropical Medicine in the northern city of Hamburg said. "It is not bird flu."

Further tests will be conducted at influenza research centers in the German cities of Hanover and Berlin.

The woman returned to Germany from Thailand Saturday with symptoms similar to those produced by the disease that has killed 12 people in Asia, raising fears that she could be Europe's first human case of the disease.

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