Bird Flu Update

From the WSJ Avian Flu News Tracker, three blips:

4:30 p.m.: A new study suggests the H5N1 virus is more widespread than thought. But it also probably doesn't kill half its victims, a fear that was based solely on flu cases that have been officially confirmed. "The results suggest that the symptoms most often are relatively mild and that close contact is needed for transmission to humans," wrote Anna Thorson of Karolinska University Hospital in Stockholm and colleagues who conducted the study. It was published in Monday's edition of Archives of Internal Medicine.

5:15 a.m.: Preliminary tests showed five more people have been infected with the H5N1 strain of bird flu virus in Turkey, a Health Ministry official said. The official said Turkish labs had detected H5N1 in five new cases. The new cases raise the number of suspected and confirmed cases in Turkey to 15.

3 a.m.: Turkish hospitals admitted a dozen new suspected bird-flu patients as the disease appeared to be spreading in Turkey. Muharrem Canak, five, and his two-year-old brother Iskender tested positive for H5N1 in preliminary tests by Turkish labs, along with a 65-year-old man, in the first suspected cases outside the eastern city of Van. The boys apparently caught the virus while playing with gloves that their father had used to handle two dead wild ducks near a dam just outside Ankara, their doctor Metin Dogan said. The boys didn't appear sick despite testing positive for the virus, Dr. Dogan said.