NASSAU, Bahamas -- Officials are testing whether dead birds found in the Bahamas, a country less than 60 miles from South Florida, had bird flu, the Pan American Health Organization said Wednesday. The results may be ready in four days.

The Bahamas Ministry of Agriculture and Marine Resources is collecting samples from the dead birds, found on the island of Great Inagua, said Sonia Mey, a spokeswoman for PAHO in Washington. The 21 migratory birds -- 15 flamingos, five roseate spoonbills and a cormorant -- were found this week in a national park.

Officials are testing to see whether the H5N1 virus has spread to the Western Hemisphere for the first time.

"This is just a case of unexplained deaths in birds and we are not excluding anything at this point in time," said Yitades Gebre, adviser for disease prevention and control for the PAHO office in Nassau.

PAHO officials said they are advising Bahamian health officials to send the samples for testing to a lab in Britain, which is just a nine-hour flight from Nassau.

A two-person team from the Bahamas health and agricultural ministries flew to the island Wednesday morning to begin collecting tissue for testing, Gebre said.

The team is expected back today, and results could be available 24 to 48 hours after the samples arrive at the laboratory, he said.

3 more die of disease

The H5N1 bird virus has spread from Asia to the Middle East, Europe and Africa. The virus has infected 174 people since late 2003, mainly through contact with birds. At least 94 of those patients have died and more than 200 million fowl worldwide have been culled or died as the virus spreads.

Meanwhile, two Indonesian children and an Iraqi woman who were treated for bird flu symptoms died, local authorities said on Thursday. The World Health Organization confirmed that the virus killed an Iraqi man.

``If you are a bird, this is already a pandemic,'' Julie Gerberding, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told a congressional hearing in Washington today. ``We're dealing with a highly lethal virus that no one has immunity to.''

Tracking a disease

The WHO is tracking human infections in the event the virus evolves to spread easily from person to person, sparking a pandemic such as the 1918 outbreak that killed 50 million people worldwide. The most recent pandemic in 1968, known as Hong Kong flu, killed 1 million people.

The U.S. government ordered 12.4 million courses of the antiviral drug Tamiflu from Roche Holding AG and 1.75 million of Relenza from GlaxoSmithKline Plc, raising the country's stockpile to almost 20 million courses of treatment. The government's pandemic readiness plan calls for enough Tamiflu to treat one in four Americans, or about 75 million people.

More than 60 countries have ordered Tamiflu, Roche said earlier this year. Sales of the drug more than quadrupled to almost $1.22 billion last year. Roche expects Tamiflu to generate sales from pandemic orders of between 1 billion and 1.2 billion francs this year.

Possible Treatment

Chemotherapy used to treat a rare immune disorder may help people infected with the H5N1 virus, a possibility that should be studied, according to an article in the Lancet today.

Studies of people who died from the virus showed they had similar symptoms and disease features as those suffering from hemophagocytic lymphohistiocytosis, or HLH, which causes the immune system to attack healthy tissue, wrote scientists at Karolinska Hospital child cancer research institute in Stockholm. Etoposide, a chemotherapy drug that improves survival of HLH patients, may offer a weapon against bird flu, researchers said.

Threat in North America

Canadian food authorities quarantined eight Quebec poultry farms that imported live ducks and hatching eggs from France, which has confirmed H5N1 infections in birds, and collected samples from the farms for testing, the Canadian Press reported, citing the Canadian Food Inspection Agency. Canada has banned all live birds from France, the Press said.

``We need to expect a bird arriving in the United States with this pathogen,'' the CDC's Gerberding said.

In China, Ministry of Agriculture ordered a farm near the city of Guangzhou to destroy all its remaining chickens while an investigation is conducted into why 6,000 chickens there died, the Hong Kong-based newspaper Apple Daily reported.

The outbreak would be China's second in poultry since the beginning of February, the paper said.

Kenya invited international aid organizations and representatives from the U.S., European Union and other governments to a briefing next week aimed at garnering support for its bird flu and pandemic influenza preparations. The meeting, to be held in the capital Nairobi March 6, is part of the government's campaign to raise $91.6 million, said Philip Muthoka, who is heading Kenya's bird flu task force.

No bird in Kenya has yet tested positive for the H5N1 virus, which was first reported in Africa last month. Nigeria, Niger and Egypt have reported outbreaks among wild birds and poultry.

Information from Bloomberg News and The Associated Press was used in this report.