This was expected but still not good news:

THE number of Turkish people thought to be infected with avian flu rose to more than 50 this weekend, prompting concern that the disease may be about to spread into Europe.

Yesterday a British laboratory confirmed that a Turkish brother and sister who died last week had the feared H5N1 strain of avian flu.

A third child from the same family in Dogubayazit, in eastern Turkey, has now died of avian flu and dozens more suspected cases have emerged.

“The laboratory in the UK said that they have detected H5N1 in samples of the two fatal cases,” said Maria Cheng, a spokeswoman for the World Health Organisation. They are the first fatalities outside East Asia.

The fact that cases of Bird Flu in humans have now been confirmed outside of Asia isn’t the real news here. What is very troubling is this quote via Instapundit:

“Professor John Oxford, an expert on flu at Queen Mary’s medical school, London, said the most worrying aspect of the deaths in Turkey was the large number of human cases resulting from exposure to a small number of birds.”

What we may be observing is a very small but significant change in the pathology of the disease – its ability to infect humans may be improving. While it still cannot be spread through the air via casual contact like sneezing or coughing, it may have mutated ever so slightly so that the virus can either trick our immune system long enough to become established or, more likely, replicate at a faster pace once inside the human body thus overwhelming our bodies’ natural defenses in a shorter period of time.

Scientists are reasonably certain that at present, the virus can only be contracted by humans after eating or handling diseased fowl. Given the proximity to their livestock that many people in the rural parts of Europe live, it is perhaps not surprising that, like peasants in Southeast Asia and Indonesia, rural Europeans would be the first to contract the disease.

I hasten to add this is rank speculation on my part. No definitive word can come about any mutations in the virus for many weeks as the painstaking process of comparing the strain of virus that killed the children in Turkey is compared gene by gene with the strain we have seen in Asia. And it could very well be a statistical oddity that makes it appear there are fewer birds infecting more humans. Or scientists could just be wrong.

Having said all that, the idea that the virus wouldn’t mutate is a dangerous notion for governments to have at this point. And trying to find answers fast enough to keep ahead of the virus as it makes its way into Europe will prove to be the biggest challenge over the next few months.