Is this how a pandemic begins?
Three children have died in Turkey from bird flu, two more are infected with H5N1, and many more are in the hospital with similar symptoms. The deceased children, as I reported earlier, had been playing with dead, apparently infected chickens. It seems reasonable to assume that they caught the disease from the dead chickens. But that raises an interesting question: how did all those other people become infected, assuming that they too have bird flu? There are really only two possibilities, both of which are bad: either they too contracted the disease from infected chickens, or the disease passed from human to human. If the latter is true, then we may have just seen the beginning of a pandemic. (This article voices the same concerns, and in more detail.) Unfortunately we have to wait as this all plays out in order to know the whole truth, but it does make one stop and think.

Tags: bird flu, avian flu, pandemic, H5N1, flu, influenza, Turkey