KRATIE, Cambodia –
While Dr. Sreyleak As she drove to work through busy, sunlit streets in Cambodia’s Mekong River Delta on the morning of February 8, she played voice messages from her team during the night. The condition of a 9-year-old boy she was caring for had deteriorated sharply and he was intubated, a doctor reported. What, she wondered, could make the child sick so quickly?
“And then all I thought was: H5N1,” she recalled. “It could be bird flu.”
When she arrived at the airy yellow children’s ward of the provincial hospital in Kratie, she immediately asked the child’s father if the family had had contact with sick or dead poultry. He admitted that their rooster had been found dead a few days earlier and that the family had eaten it.
