Periscope

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Avian Flu: East Meets West

The bird flu that claimed three children's lives in Turkey last week may well turn out to be the beginning of the worst human outbreak of the disease yet. Lab tests confirmed that two of the children had definitely succumbed to the deadly H5 strain of the disease, and the other two in the same family caught it as well. The deaths, near the remote city of Van in eastern Turkey, were the first human fatalities outside East Asia. And by Saturday night, 30 people had been hospitalized with suspected bird flu at the Van University Hospital. Other suspected human bird-flu cases were emerging at many hospitals in Turkey's impoverished east. If even half of the Van hospital cases prove to be bird flu, it would be the worst outbreak of the disease in the two years since it began, according to the WHO.

The disease rarely infects humans, but when it does, the mortality rate is 50 percent. And although the WHO believes the Turkish victims had exposure to chickens, rather than human-to-human contact, there have been a handful of single cases of direct human-to-human transmission in Southeast Asia. "That's our biggest fear," says WHO virologist Caroline Brown.

--Sami Kohen and Rod Nordland

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