Turkish Bird Flu is Deadly Strain

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Turkish Bird Flu is Deadly Strain

 

Saturday, January 7, 2006 Posted: 2249 GMT (0649 HKT)

 

GENEVA, Switzerland (AP) -- Teenage siblings who died of bird flu in

Turkey were the first humans outside East Asia to succumb to the deadly

H5N1 strain that has apparently been spread by migratory birds, the U.N.

health agency said Saturday.

 

A British laboratory confirmed Saturday that the 15-year-old girl and

her 14-year-old brother were infected with the virus, said Maria Cheng,

spokeswoman for the World Health Organization. Testing is continuing on

an 11-year-old sister who died Friday.

 

" She had similar symptoms and the clinical course of her illness was the

same, " Cheng said. " So it would be very probable that she died of H5N1,

but right now we don't have the laboratory test to prove that. "

 

Five WHO experts were to travel Sunday to the city of Van, near the

border with Iran, not far from the village where the three children

died, to try to determine whether the disease was spread from animals or

other humans.

 

Iran restricted movement along its border to prevent the disease from

spreading into the country.

 

Cheng said Turkish laboratories have so far found that two other

children in a Turkish hospital are infected with H5N1. The British lab

Saturday confirmed one of the cases and may be about to confirm the

other, she said.

 

Altogether Turkish officials are testing about 30 patients -- most of

them children -- for bird flu, she said.

 

The spread of the disease from East Asia, where it has killed more than

70 people, was " a concern, " but the global risk assessment of a human

pandemic was unchanged, she said.

 

" Right now these new cases in Turkey -- they don't elevate the global

risk assessment, so we're still in the same pandemic alert phase that

we've been in for the last couple of years, " said Cheng. " But it's

something that needs to be monitored very closely. "

 

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.

 

Copyright 2006 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.