Letters from NYC

Third child in Family Dies in east Turkey of Bird Flu

By Vincent Boland in Ankara
Published by Financial Times at FT.com on January 6 2006 10:53am | Last updated: January 6 2006 18:39

A third child from the same family in Turkey died on Friday of bird flu after tests confirmed that two of the victims had been infected with the H5N1 strain of the virus.

Eleven-year-old Hulya Kocyigit died a day after her 15-year-old sister, Fatma. Their 14-year-old brother Mehmet Ali, died on Sunday. Ali Hasan, their six-year-old brother, appears to be recovering. The children had all eaten infected chicken that had lived partly in their home.

By late Friday, hospitals in the east of the country near the Iranian and Armenian borders had reported that at least 34 people had been admitted with bird flu-like symptoms.

Huseyin Avni Sahin, chief doctor at Centennial University Hospital in Van, where the children died, told Turkish television there were 23 people in his care, and “more than half of them are children”.

Suspected outbreaks of bird flu were also spreading outside the immediate area. CNN Turk television reported that a 13-year-old boy from Sanliurfa, near the border with Syria, had been taken to hospital in Diyarbakir.

Tests conducted at a laboratory in the UK confirmed that the virus that caused the deaths of two of the children was H5N1, the strain that has killed at least 74 people in Asia. A third person who also tested positive for H5N1 is being treated.

The World Health Organisation said in Geneva it was conducting tests to determine whether the bird flu cases resulted from human-to-human transmission. Results were expected in days but there was no indication the virus was passing between humans.

The UN health agency said more than 5,000 boxes of the antiviral drug Tamiflu were sent to eastern Turkey and five artificial respiration machines were also sent to the hospital in Van. In Switzerland, the Tamiflu maker Roche Pharmaceuticals said it had expedited the delivery of 100,000 packs of the drug.

The outbreak has exposed the primitive living conditions of many peasant families in the region and given rise to fears that other families who shared their homes with poultry would also be infected.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan, prime minister, appealed to families to give up their poultry for culling and promised to compensate them. “I wish God’s mercy on the children,” he said, adding: “Everybody must have a greater awareness of what is going on.”

A joint WHO/European Commission team was expected to arrive in eastern Turkey on Friday. Four more WHO experts will go to Turkey at the weekend.

The Turkish media, which are giving blanket coverage to the crisis, have pointed the finger at both the government, which they claim was unprepared for the outbreak, and the people themselves, for not heeding warnings that bird flu was fatal and that eating infected poultry was dangerous.