Four-year-old Ibrahim Helmi and 7-year-old Mahmoud Shalabi from the southern provinces of Qena and Suhag, respectively, tested positive for the H5N1 strain of avian influenza. A 4-year- old girl, Mariam Abdel Fattah, of the Nile Delta province of Qalyoubia, north of Cairo, also contracted bird flu. All of them had sick poultry at their homes, Hamdi Mahmoud, a spokesman for the Health Ministry, said.

Egypt is one of three countries that haven't been able to contain the disease, effectively making them reservoirs of the virus for possible spread to other nations, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization said in a statement. Outbreaks have hit four commercial farms and an additional 13 were reported in backyard poultry since March 1, the FAO said.

"Egypt and Indonesia are heavily infected, as is Nigeria, though to a lesser extent," FAO Chief Veterinary Officer Joseph Domenech said in the statement. "This situation is a constant call to increase global efforts to contain this disease before it has an opportunity to mutate into a form that can threaten the world with a human pandemic."

The virus is known to have infected 285 people in 12 countries since 2003, killing 170 of them as of March 29, Geneva- based World Health Organization said on its Web site. The U.S. National Institutes of Health said today that part of its response to the disease will be to award $161 million over seven years to establish six national centers to study bird flu.

17 Nations

Bird flu outbreaks have occurred in 56 countries in Africa, Asia and Europe since 2003. Last year, 53 nations reported avian flu outbreaks, compared with 17 countries affected this year, the FAO said. Infections in fowl create opportunities for the virus to change into a pandemic form.

"Egypt has faced problems containing the disease for a number of reasons, including the lack of compensation to help farmers who lose their poultry to culling," the FAO said. The country is revising its strategic plan for avian flu control, the agency said.

The Middle East's most populous nation, Egypt has reported 32 human cases of the H5N1 strain of bird flu, the most outside Asia. Nine of those infected were children. The three children who tested positive were taken to a hospital in Cairo, where they are being treated with Roche Holding AG's Tamiflu antiviral medicine, Mahmoud said.

Contact with animals

Thirteen people have died in Egypt since the first case of avian flu was discovered last year. Most of those have been women taking care of household poultry. They often denied contact with sick animals because they feared the government would destroy their fowl, a main source of meat and eggs for 5 million households that raise birds at home.

"It makes it much easier for us when people tell the hospital they had sick birds at home," Mahmoud said. "They used to deny, contributing to the deaths of many curable cases, but now it has changed a little."