Turkey update

Turkish labs detected H5N1 in the five new cases, which were discovered in four separate provinces, according to a Health Ministry official speaking on condition of anonymity because she was not authorized to speak to the media.

In addition, more than 60 people with flu-like symptoms who had come in close contact with fowl had been hospitalized around the country by Monday and were undergoing tests, officials said.

"The more humans infected with the avian virus, the more chance it has to adapt," Guenael R.M. Rodier, a senior WHO official for communicable diseases, said during a visit to Dogubayazit, a largely Kurdish town bordering Iran where three children from the same family have died.

Source. Here is WHO's latest update on Turkey. Klaus Stoehr, coordinator of the WHO's influenza program, notes:

"If we were dealing with a virus of a different characteristic, with higher transmissibility between humans, we would have first seen more cases among health care workers, among the playmates of these children, more cases in the village, than what we are seeing now.

"So it's more likely that the animal disease is more widespread than we anticipated than before ... the disease was detected among animals two months ago, and there has been apparently sub-optimal surveillance among animals ongoing for quite some time."

Stoehr stressed that there was "currently too little data" to rule out a mutation in the virus, which was why a WHO team was in eastern Turkey to help investigate the problem.

Effect Measure comments:

Let me state the obvious: this is pretty stupid, Klaus. You have no idea if the risk has changed or not. No one knows. You are just blowing smoke. But there is reasonable concern that the risk has indeed changed, either because the virus is moving more easily from bird to human or now from human to human. Maybe it will turn out that nothing has changed, but I wouldn't bet on it and I can't understand why you would say it, unless you wanted to blow whatever credibility you had left. If the truth is scary, it is at least the truth