Reports that two Turkish children had bird flu and that one has died of the virus are disturbing but not yet a cause for panic, a U.N. official said Wednesday.
Turkey’s health minister said two people had been diagnosed with bird flu, and that one of them was a 14-year-old boy who died Sunday. Doctors said his sister was also infected and in serious condition.
The tests have not been confirmed but a senior World Health Organization official said the boy probably had died of the H5N1 bird flu virus.
“This is disturbing information, but we expect to see sporadic cases of bird flu in humans in an environment where there is significant bird flu among chickens or other poultry,” Dr. David Nabarro, senior coordinator for avian influenza at the United Nations and a former World Health Organization official, said in a telephone interview.
“This is not the start of the pandemic. The start of the pandemic starts when there is human to human transfer, confirmed and sustained.”
If confirmed, the cases would be the first known human infections outside of eastern Asia.
It was not immediately clear which tests had been done to diagnose the two, and if the virus involved was the same H5N1 strain that has killed 74 people out of 142 infected in five Asian countries.
“Let’s wait until there is a confirmation,” Nabarro said.
The H5N1 avian influenza virus has swept flocks of poultry in Asia and as far west as Russia, Ukraine, Romania and Turkey. So far it remains mostly a bird virus but it occasionally affects people.
Scientists fear it could change into a form that could easily pass from person to person, sparking a pandemic — a global epidemic — that could kill millions.
A spokesman for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had no immediate information on the report.
Turkey would normally send virus samples to a WHO-approved lab in Britain for further testing.
Scientists said important questions to ask include whether the Turkish brother and sister had been in contact with infected poultry and whether there was evidence one had infected the other.