Death toll hits four in Turkey bird flu outbreak
Bernama, 17 Jan 2006

AFP Photo
Pigeon on the roof of a house in Ankara, Turkey. The death toll from bird flu in Turkey hit four after a local lab detected the virus in a teenager who died over the weekend, as doctors warned that seeking medical help too late was proving fatal.
 

ANKARA (AFP) - The death toll from bird flu in Turkey hit four after a local lab detected the virus in a teenager who died over the weekend, as doctors warned that seeking medical help too late was proving fatal.

Samples from Fatma Ozcan, who died Sunday in a hospital in the eastern city of Van, tested positive for the lethal H5N1 strain of avian influenza, the health ministry said, after initial tests returned negative results.

Doctors in the hospital in Van were battling to save her five-year-old brother, Muhammed, described as the most worrisome case among the 16 confirmed H5N1 carriers in the country.

Ten others of those infected remain under treatment in hospitals across the country, while five have been discharged, the ministry said. The chief physician of the Van hospital, Huseyin Avni Sahin, told AFP that the boy did not yet need the support of a respiratory machine, and later told Anatolia news agency he was showing some signs of improvement.

His sister, whose age figures as 12 in official records, was actually 16, Agriculture Minister Mehdi Eker clarified, referring to a widespread practice among rural families to register their children years after they are born at home. Three other siblings, aged between 11 and 15, died earlier this month in the same hospital, the first bird flu fatalities outside Southeastern Asia and China, where the disease has killed some 80 people since 2003.

Doctors said the Ozcan siblings, like the first three children who died of the flu, were brought to the hospital long after contagion, significantly reducing their chances of survival.

"The first three cases came 10 days after (they began showing the symptoms), while the fourth -- five days after," Sahin said. "Naturally, this leads us to suggest that belated treatment is a primary factor in fatality cases."

Days before Fatma Ozcan perished, she was shown on television, sitting visibly sick on a hospital bench in the remote town of Dogubeyazit, as her father argued with a doctor against sending the two children to a larger hospital. The man agreed to send the children to Van only after he was persuaded that he would not be charged for their treatment.

Eastern Turkey is one of Turkey's most impoverished regions, where people breed fowl in their backyards, often as their only livelihood. The cabinet decided at a weekly meeting Monday to step up efforts to raise awareness among the people, which Eker described as "the most serious challenge" for the authorities.

The outbreak has not yet had an adverse impact on the thriving tourism sector, the government's spokesman, Justice Minister Cemil Cicek, said, even though Europe's biggest travel operator TUI said tourists had begun to hesitate and neighboring Greece advised its nationals to shun trips across the border.

Some 900,000 birds have been slaughtered across the country since late December when the virus was detected in poultry in a remote region near the border with Iran, Eker said. The virus has steadily spread westwards, reaching the capital Ankara and Turkey's biggest city Istanbul, on the doorstep of Europe.

The UN's Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) said the disease could still be kept in check if Turkey received enough help. "We still have time to prevent the pathology from becoming an epidemic if Turkish veterinary services receive the necessary aid from international organizations," FAO official Juan Lubroth said in Rome.

Eker, set to address a major international conference on bird flu in China, charged that some neighboring countries were hiding the presence of the disease on their soil and urged transparency. "This is a global problem.... Particularly countries with non-transparent regimes are hiding the disease," he told NTV television.

"Some countries around us, where we know that the disease exists, do not officially acknowledge that, either," he said. The disease, believed to be spread by migratory birds, has been officially confirmed in regions neighboring Armenia, Iran and Syria.

All H5N1 carriers in Turkey have been in close contact with sick birds, officials say, ruling out the possibility of human-to-human transmission, which scientists fear may spark a global pandemic.

Representatives of 90 countries and 25 organizations were set to meet in Beijing on Tuesday and Wednesday to raise the 1.5 billion dollars (1.2 billion euros) needed to prevent a potential global catastrophe of a bird flu pandemic.