KurdistanObserver.com

Anger Grows As Turkey Calls For Bird Flu Calm
By Nicolas Cheviron
Jan 10, 2006  AFP

AN angry crowd has mobbed Turkey's health minister in this remote eastern town, home of the country's first bird flu deaths, as Ankara reported more human cases of the lethal disease, raising alarms over its menacing westward advance.

Some 100 people were awaiting test results, including 10 from Istanbul, the country's business hub on the doorstep of Europe, where the presence of the disease among poultry has already been confirmed, officials said.

Turkish laboratories determined that five more people had contracted the potentially lethal H5N1 strain of the virus, officials said, raising the total number of human cases in the country to 14, all but one of them children and teenagers, including two siblings already dead.

Four of the new cases were from three northern provinces, confirming that the virus is steadily advancing from remote, rural eastern areas to the more urbanized west, with three H5N1 carriers already hospitalized in the capital Ankara.

The crisis unnerved Turkey's tourism industry, a vital source of revenue, with hoteliers fearing the virus may jump to the Mediterranean coast, home to posh resorts that welcome millions of foreigners each year.

"The situation is alarming to the tourism industry," Osman Ayik, the head of a hoteliers' association in the Mediterranean province of Antalya, said.

Russia and Britain, whose tourists are among the most frequent visitors of Turkish seaside resorts, have already advised their citizens against travelling to Turkey.

The European Union sought to bolster its defences, announcing new import bans on six countries surrounding Turkey as its experts assessed the situation in the worst-hit areas in the east together with a World Health Organisation (WHO) team.

A brother and sister from Dogubeyazit, near the border with Iran, died last week, becoming the first victims of the virus outside Southeast Asia and China, where more than 70 people have perished since 2003.

A third sibling also died but the cause of her death is yet to be determined.

Of the five new cases, two siblings from Kastamonu, aged four and five, were hospitalized in Ankara but showing no sign of illness yet, senior health ministry official Turan Buzgan told the Anatolia news agency.

A five-year-old boy from Corum, initially treated for pneumonia, was brought to the same hospital in Ankara and is now improving, he said, and a 12-year-old is undergoing treatment in Samsun, on the Black Sea coast.

The fifth patient, aged 18, was hospitalized in the eastern city of Van, where four other children infected with H5N1 are currently undergoing treatment.

As the emergency cull of fowl continued across the country, the agriculture ministry was drafting legislation to ban outdoor poultry breeding, largely blamed for the spread of the virus, Anatolia reported.

Most of the infected patients come from impoverished rural areas, where people breed poultry in their homes and often take them indoors during the winter, providing ideal conditions for contamination.

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan pleaded with citizens to hand over sick birds for slaughter amid reports that many are hiding their poultry, reluctant to part with what are often their sole livelihoods.

Many in the mainly Kurdish east are also illiterate and do not speak Turkish, further complicating efforts to raise their awareness.

Adding a political twist to the crisis, an angry crowd mobbed and booed Health Minister Recep Akdag as he visited Dogubeyazit, accusing the government of neglecting them because they are Kurds.

"We need doctors," "Go see our villages with the dead chickens, where no one dares to tread," people shouted as some 80 villages in the area still awaited slaughter teams.

Surrounded by a phalanx of policemen, Mr Akdag promised the town a new hospital and more experts to enlighten residents about the disease.

Despite the popular anger, the head of the WHO team accompanying Mr Akdag said the fundamental problem was the large size of the infected areas.

"They reacted rapidly... and their reaction was structured," Guenael Rodier told AFP. "The problem is the scope of this man-animal frontline – it must be reduced."

In one refreshing development, the youngest brother of the dead children was discharged from hospital after doctors decided he was free from danger.

Greeted by an army of reporters outside the Van hospital, a beaming Hasan Ali Kocyigit, 6, said he was returning home to Dogubeyazit, his immediate plans to collect sweets from neighbors during the Muslim al-Adha feast, which begins Tuesday.

The boy appeared to have miraculously escaped infection from the H5N1 virus after the four siblings played with the head of a sick chicken the impoverished family slaughtered and ate.

The hospital discharged four other children, brothers and sisters of a boy and a girl identified as H5N1 carriers and currently in intensive care.

Culling began in the outskirts of Istanbul, Governor Muammer Guler said, adding that city officials were awaiting the test results of 10 cases, with several hospitals put on alert.

Istanbul, a city of some 12 million people, is the westernmost point where the virus has been found since it resurfaced in Turkey last month after a first outbreak in nearby Balikesir in October was successfully contained.

Currently, humans are believed to contract bird flu only through close contact with infected birds, but scientists fear millions could die if the virus mutates with human flu strains to become highly contagious.

Meanwhile epidemiologists from European Union member states are to meet this week in Luxembourg to review the spread of bird flu, the European Commission said today.