CAIRO — Beyond smokestacks and whipped donkeys, past fish curled on dirty ice and sparrows skimming laundry hanging in alleys, the death of 6-year-old Ali Mohammed Ali brought mystery, health inspectors and truckloads of police to a poor Cairo neighborhood.
Ali, a first-grader and computer wizard from Shubra el Kheima, died last week in a hospital, his lungs full of fluid, a stent in his chest. Health officials say he had bird flu, but they can't pinpoint where he picked it up: The market, the school, on the rooftops with the pigeon keepers or on a recent trip to his grandfather's village in the Nile Delta?
Nobody knows. Homes and classrooms have been disinfected, neighborhood poultry has been confiscated and culled, and the man splitting chicken breasts with a machete next to the baker keeps watch for police in case he has to disappear in a hurry. There is alarm and nonchalance, talk of a health epidemic, grumbles of conspiracy.
"The Health Ministry came. They checked our flat, they took our blood. They tested everyone in this building for infection," said Ali's mother, Aleya Ismail. "But still they don't know how it got into my son. Where can I raise poultry here? Under the bed? How could this virus have found him?"
Egypt has had 65 cases of bird flu, including 26 deaths, since 2006 -- the highest national toll outside Asia, where the virus, designated as H5N1, was believed to have first appeared in humans in 1997.
Ali's fever and final hours in an intensive care unit came days before word came of the swine flu outbreak that is suspected in the deaths of more than 150 people in Mexico and has spread in the United States and into Europe and the Middle East. Egypt has ordered the slaughter of the nation's 300,000 pigs.
Bird flu, which has killed hundreds of people worldwide in the last dozen years, threatens to be a pandemic but has yet to reach that critical stage, though it has become embedded in bird flocks and spread to dozens of nations. Arising mainly from direct contact with infected fowl, bird flu lingers at the edge of the swine flu crisis, another deadly squiggle of cells and strands beneath the microscope.
The World Health Organization is concerned that, like swine flu, the avian virus could mutate and become easily transmissible between humans. Scientists fear that if this happens the avian virus could be more dangerous than the swine flu outbreak, overwhelming cities such as Cairo, where overcrowding, poor sanitation, suspicion and cultural traditions are more potent than Tamiflu prescriptions and warnings spoken through the masks of health workers.
