ANKARA (AFP) - Foreign assistance flowed into Turkey from Western countries seeking to help combat the bird flu outbreak as Europe suffered a scare after one person was hospitalized in Belgium with symptoms of the virus.

But Belgium doctors later ruled out bird flu in the Russian journalist who had been hospitalized in Brussels after falling sick upon returning from infected areas in Turkey, where the disease has killed three people.

"We are 100 percent sure it is not bird flu," Rene Snacken, a virologist at Belgium's Public Health Institute, told a press conference at Saint Peter's Hospital in Brussels, where the patient was put under observation late Friday.

Earlier, Belgian Health Minister Rudy Demotte, who identified the patient as a journalist with the Russian Vesti television channel, said, "It would seem that according to the initial indications it is not a case of bird flu."

Snacken said "the tests carried out on this patient twice excluded the H5 virus and twice confirmed H3, which corresponds to a seasonal (human) influenza strain."

The virulent H5N1 strain of bird flu has so far claimed three lives in Turkey, the first outside southeast Asia and China, where nearly 80 people have died since 2003. Another 15 people have been confirmed to be infected with the virus in Turkey.

In Ankara, government ministers and representatives of the poultry industry met in a bid to salvage the sector hit hard by the disease. Vice-Premier Abdullatif Sener announced the creation of an ad hoc committee to make concrete proposals on how to ease the industry out of its worst crisis yet. Measures might include more state subventions and low-interest loans.

Poultry consumption has plummeted by 70 percent since the outbreak, badly damaging a sector that has an annual turnover of nearly three billion dollars (2.5 billion euros) and provides revenue for half a million producers, transporters and retailers.

On Friday, Agriculture Minister Mehdi Eker said Turkey was expecting 35 million dollars in loans and grants from a World Bank-sponsored program to help countries struck by the disease. A total of 15 million dollars of that amount will come as a loan from the World Bank and the remainder will be in the form of grants from a special fund set up by countries and international organizations, he said.

The European Commission has also announced that it was putting aside 80 million euros (97 million dollars) for countries struck by the flu, of which 35 million euros will be allocated to Asian countries; the commission did not say what Turkey's share would be.

Turkey can also count on a four-million-euro advance from its so-called "enlargement" fund allocated for 2007 within the framework of its accession negotiations with the European Union.