WHO confirms deadly bird flu in Turkey
By Benjamin Harvey (AP)
Updated: 2006-01-08 10:27

Turkish Health Minister Recep Akdag said Saturday there was no reason to suspect human-to-human transmission, and he urged calm, saying there was no risk of a pandemic.

But Dr. Gencay Gursoy, head of the Istanbul Physicians Association, said the situation was grave.

"Turkey and the world are facing the threat of a serious infection," he said.

So far, H5N1 has been capable in rare cases of transmitting from poultry to humans in close contact with them. Experts fear that if the virus should mutate to a strain that passes easily among people, it could set off a human flu pandemic.

"At the moment we don't know enough about the situation to tell whether or not the virus has changed in some way," said Cheng.

The doctor of the three siblings who died said they probably contracted the illness by playing with dead chickens.

Cheng said the area is rural, with a lot of poultry farming and that residents tend to live in close proximity to their birds. She said the cases were worrying in part because of the distance from East Asia.

"It is a jump," she said. "And if you look at how H5N1 has spread in animals, it sort of follows that pattern and implicates the role of migratory birds, because we started seeing last year H5N1 being detected in the Ural mountains, in Siberia, Mongolia, Turkey, Romania."

Authorities have culled thousands of fowl in the affected regions, but in the village of Dagdelen, on the outskirts of Dogubayazit — the hometown of the three children who died — villagers gathered outside an Agriculture Ministry building to complain that no one had come to cull their fowl.

In nearby Bozkurt village, local administrator Ahmet Koylu said chickens and dogs were dying but that no one had come to investigate.

On Saturday, officials reported a new bird flu case in poultry in a village near Bursa, in western Turkey, the Anatolia news agency reported.

Since January 2004, a total of 142 human cases of H5N1 infection have been reported in Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia, Indonesia and China.