An 11-year-old girl became the third victim of bird flu in Turkey on Friday, days after her brother and sister died from the disease. Hulya Kocyigit died in a hospital in the eastern city of Van, as teams from the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the European Commission arrived in the region to assess the risk.
Doctors said the Kocyigit children had almost certainly contracted bird flu after playing with the heads of dead chickens at their parents’ rural poultry farm. The girl’s sister Fatima (15) and brother Mehmet Ali (14) died earlier this week. They are the first to have died from the H5N1 bird-flu strain in Turkey, prompting fears it could spread to mainland Europe.
”It looks like these cases have come from direct contact with poultry. We have seen this with most of the East Asian cases,” Christine McNab, a spokesperson for the WHO in Geneva, said on Friday. She added: ”If there is an outbreak of avian flu in poultry, then eventually there will be human cases, especially if people touch infected chicken blood, feathers or insides. It’s one of the major modes of transmission.”
About 30 people are in hospital with bird-flu-like symptoms, officials in Van said. Three of them are in a serious condition. The condition of a fourth ill child from the same family has improved and he is no longer on a respirator.
The children were admitted with high fevers, coughing and bleeding in their throats. They had reportedly tossed the chicken heads ”like balls” inside their home in Dogubayazit, a remote town close to the border with Armenia.
”They played with the heads for days,” Huseyin Avni Sahin, the head of the hospital, told agencies. ”They were in very, very close contact with the dead chickens.”
Turkey’s Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, said people need to be educated about the dangers after new cases were detected in five areas of eastern and south-eastern Turkey. The disease appears to have arrived via migratory birds from the Caucasus. Deaths of chickens from bird flu in the Dogubayazit district were first reported late last year. The disease in birds has also been discovered in Romania, Russia and Croatia.
On Friday, the Kurdish mayor of Dogubayazit accused the government of not doing enough. Mukkades Kubilay said the town does not have enough resources or medical facilities, Kurdish groups in London reported. Turkey said it is sending medicines to the area. The Health Minister, Recep Akdag, dismissed fears of a pandemic but said it is risky to have close contact with fowl.
Agriculture Minister Mehdi Eker said the problem is aggravated as households with poultry allow them in their homes at night when temperatures fall. — Guardian Unlimited Â