Turks see flu secrecy

Gov’t implements new measures, unveils plan to salvage poultry sector

A shop window of an egg wholesale merchant in Istanbul yesterday showed ‘shocking prices.’ Egg sales have plummeted in Turkey since the bird flu outbreak.

By Sibel Utku Bila - Agence France-Presse

ANKARA - Turkey charged yesterday that some neighboring countries were covering up bird flu outbreaks, hampering efforts to contain the spread of the disease which has already claimed four lives in the country.

“The presence of the disease in several other countries — our neighbors governed by closed regimes — is known unofficially, but those countries do not declare it openly,” Agriculture Minister Mehdi Eker told a meeting here with governors from Turkey’s 81 provinces.

“Governors in border provinces should take this into account in their efforts against the disease,” he said, without giving names.

Worst-hit eastern Turkey shares borders with Iran, which says it is already culling poultry as a precaution, as well as Armenia, Azerbaijan’s autonomous republic of Nachichivan and Georgia. Bird flu has also been detected in a southeastern province bordering Syria.

A team of US experts, meanwhile, travelled to Turkey’s east to assess the situation and see what assistance Washington could offer. “We are here to learn about what is happening and what has been done,” Ann Derse, the head of the delegation, said in the eastern city of Erzurum, the Anatolia news agency reported.

“We are also looking into how the United States, a strong friend and ally of Turkey, can help,” she said.

The team was set to travel over the weekend to Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia to assess the situation there and return to Ankara next week to share their findings with Turkish officials, a US diplomat said.

The H5N1 strain of bird flu has killed four teenagers in eastern Turkey since January 1, the first fatalities outside Southeast Asia and China, where the disease has claimed some 80 lives since 2003. Another 17, all but two of them children, have been confirmed as carriers of the virus.

Yesterday, five siblings, aged between five and 15, from Dogubeyazit town near the border with Iran, where all four dead children lived, were sent to a hospital in Erzurum on the suspicion that they might have contracted H5N1, Anatolia reported.

Given the particular threat bird flu has posed to children in Turkey, the government is considering the introduction of lessons in primary schools to teach the dangers of close contact with birds, Health Minister Recep Akdag told the Milliyet newspaper.

In rural areas children often treat chickens as pets, and teenage girls, who help in household tasks, slaughter and cook them.

Akdag said, however, that the most efficient way to fight the disease would be to halt the backyard breeding of fowl, widespread in rural areas and blamed for most of the infections in the country.

For many poor people the poultry they breed at home are the only livelihood for their large families.

The bird flu threat is of a dimension that requires “a cultural change” in the way people live, Akdag told Milliyet. “According to the agriculture ministry, the number of birds bred in backyards across Turkey is about 10 million,” Akdag said. “The definite and permanent solution would be to slaughter them and halt such type of breeding for good.” In a hospital in Van, eastern Turkey, doctors said five-year-old Muhammed Ozcan, one of the gravest cases among the patients currently under treatment, was improving, five days after his sister succumbed to the disease after slaughtering a sick duck for food.

In Ankara, Deputy Prime Minister Abdullatif Sener announced a plan estimated to cost at least 53.2 million lira (33 million euros) to salvage the poultry sector after sales plummeted by at least 70 percent.