Three children from bird flu hit village hospitalized in Turkey

Turkey's Agriculture Ministry said tests were under way to determine whether it was the H5N1 strain. Turkey was hard hit by bird flu in January 2006, when 12 people were infected and four died of the H5N1 strain.

The children aged 1 1/2, three and 16 were admitted to a local hospital as a precaution in the town of Gercus with high fever and dizziness, Dogan said, citing doctors.

"We've culled some of the sick fowl on our own, we touched the chickens," the agency quoted 16-year-old Selman Cakir as saying.

All children were from the village of Bogazkoy where the latest outbreak was first reported on Feb. 5. Authorities said they have quarantined three villages in southeastern Batman province, culling around 1,650 birds since then.

"Right now, a threat of an epidemic is out of the question," Nihat Pakdil, deputy undersecretary of the Agriculture Ministry, told private NTV television earlier.

The Agriculture Ministry confirmed on Thursday that samples tested positive for bird flu but stressed that further tests were needed to determine whether it was the deadly H5N1 strain.

Authorities were also culling fowl in the nearby villages of Aydinli and Ruzgarli as a precaution, Pakdil said, and warned people to avoid contact with birds. There were no reports of any human infection in the area.

The H5N1 strain has claimed at least 165 human lives worldwide since it began ravaging Asian poultry farms in late 2003, according to the World Health Organization. Experts worry the virus, which remains hard for people to catch, will evolve into a form that passes easily among humans, potentially sparking a pandemic. So far, most cases have been traced to contact with infected birds. The Associated Press

/The International Herald Tribune/