Remote Turk villages wait

Gov’t flyers, mosque messages urge locals to kill off poultry in bird flu zone

A Turkish girl directs her ducks to their coop in a village named Yilanli close to the eastern Turkish town of Dogubayazit yesterday. Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said none of the latest human victims were dangerously ill and urged Turks not to panic.

TELCEKER (AFP) - Hundreds of chickens in this village near the Iranian border have died since a bird flu outbreak began 10 days ago in nearby Dogubayazit, but inhabitants said yesterday that they were still awaiting the arrival of veterinary teams.

“We’ve had quite a few chickens die — several hundred,” a town official said. “People buried them near the river.” He was speaking on condition of anonymity in the only teahouse of Telceker, which has a population of about 2,100, most of them Kurdish farmers and their families.

“They came from the local state agricultural office,” he said, “and they told us the veterinarians would arrive tomorrow” — Thursday.

This snowbound hamlet 15 kilometers (less than 10 miles) from the border with Iran is one of more than 80 settlements attached to Dogubayazit, the epicenter of the avian influenza outbreak.

Such has been the task facing the 12 teams of veterinarians collecting and exterminating poultry in the town that lost two of its teenagers to the deadly H5N1 virus that they have not yet had time to reach the outlying villages.

But news of the outbreak came quickly to Telceker by way of government flyers and announcements read over the mosque’s public address system, and locals began to kill off their chickens themselves, the official said.

“We’re not backward people here, we even have an elementary school,” he said proudly, adding that the villagers had grasped what precautions they should take — not eating the sick animals being the first.

“People who haven’t culled their chickens yet keep them in their coops to avoid contamination,” he said.

But a mixed flock of turkeys and chickens gobbled and clucked their way down the street in an instant denial of his words.

The people of Telceker appeared less politically militant than those of the bigger town, Dogubayazit, where Health Minister Recep Akdag was mobbed Monday by angry crowds because they see government indifference to their fate as Kurds in a bird flu zone.

The village official did not seem to hold it against the authorities that they had not yet come to Telceker.

“The teams working now are Kurds too,” he said, “so what can we say?” But given assurances that his identity would not be revealed, he hazarded that the village had not had a doctor for the past 25 years, that their school had only three teachers, and that the only visible government institution was the gendarmerie.

“It’s true — the state doesn’t care about us,” commented Resul Ozer, a farmer in his 60s, but refused to say anything else.

ANKARA (AP) - Turks have no reason to panic over the outbreak of bird flu, the World Health Organization said yesterday, but UN agriculture experts warned that the deadly H5N1 strain could become widespread among animals in Turkey and posed a serious risk to farming in neighboring countries.

“The worst situation is a panic situation. There is no reason to panic,” Dr Marc Danzon, the UN health agency’s regional director for Europe, told reporters at a news conference with Turkish Health Minister Recep Akdag. Danzon said health officials were doing “everything that is known to maintain and manage this difficult situation.” However, he added: “The risk is global... We need to exercise solidarity.”

In Rome, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization cautioned that the Turkish outbreak could spread to farms in neighboring countries.

“The virus may be spreading despite the control measures already taken,” said Juan Lubroth, senior animal health officer at the agency.

SOFIA (AFP) - Bulgaria, sandwiched between Romania and Turkey, is on high alert to prevent an outbreak of bird flu, Agriculture Minister Nihat Kabil told Parliament yesterday but said that no cases of the potentially deadly disease had been detected so far.

“No cases of bird flu have been detected among the 7,000 analyses of samples we have taken from both live and dead birds,” Kabil said.

But the number of wild birds spending the winter in the wetlands near Shabla and Durankulak in eastern Bulgaria “has gone up over 10 times in the past days and is continuing to rise,” he added.

Kabil was particularly worried about a recent outbreak of the disease in Istanbul because Turkey’s largest city is close to southern Bulgaria.

Hundreds of Turkish families of Bulgarian origin flocked the border checkpoints between the two countries this week for the beginning of a Muslim holiday, known in Bulgaria as Kurban Bayram.

All bird meat and eggs in travelers’ luggage were seized and destroyed at the border after Bulgaria banned all bird-product imports from Turkey in December. All vehicles coming from Turkey were sprayed with disinfectants.

Officials at the Kapitan Andreyevo checkpoint this week prevented three attempts of smuggling chicken meat.

Two dead chickens found in a small farm near Kardzhali, close to the Turkish border, Tuesday caused panic among villagers but veterinary services said the fowl had not died of bird flu.