Turkey rules out bird flu in teenager’s death

Suspected victim died of pneumonia; another in critical condition

By Sibel Utku Bila - Agence France-Presse

ANKARA - A Turkish boy who died over the weekend was not carrying the lethal bird flu virus as initially feared, Turkish officials said yesterday as they stepped up measures to avoid a second outbreak of the disease in a remote eastern region.

Tests conducted on the 14-year-old boy and three of his siblings who were hospitalized in the eastern city of Van did not point to any kind of flu infection, said Turan Buzgan, the head of the Health Ministry’s basic health services department.

If confirmed, Muhammet Ali Kocyigit, who died Sunday evening, would have been the first human carrier of the virus outside East Asia, where the disease has killed some 70 people since 2003.

“The disease and the death were not the result of bird flu,” Buzgan told the Anatolia news agency.

The illness of the teenager and five other patients suspected of carrying the virus was diagnosed as pneumonia.

“Tests conducted by one of the doctors at our establishment determined that the six patients suffered from pulmonary infections from pneumonia,” Huseyin Avni Sahin, the chief physician of the hospital in Van, told CNN-Turk news channel.

The boy and three siblings, aged between 6 and 15, were hospitalized over the weekend after eating chicken which was slaughtered after showing signs of the potentially deadly disease two weeks ago.

They had fever and were coughing and bleeding from the mouth.

Two other people — a 35-year-old woman and a 5-year-old boy — were hospitalized on Sunday in Van with the same symptoms.

Another of the Kocyigit siblings remained in “critical” condition yesterday, while the four other patients were doing relatively better, Sahin said.

All six were from the remote town of Dogubeyazit in the province of Agri, less than 100 kilometers (60 miles) south of Aralik, a town on the border with Armenia where the second bird flu outbreak in Turkey was confirmed last week.

Dead chickens in Aralik, Igdir province, tested positive for the H5 avian influenza virus. Officials are awaiting the test results of samples sent to a British laboratory to determine whether it was the lethal H5N1 strain, which can be dangerous to humans.

Some 750 birds were slaughtered as a precaution to prevent transmission; the town has been put under quarantine and all poultry sales in the outlying areas have been banned.

Authorities in Dogubeyazit said they had also banned the movement of winged animals in and out of the town and ordered residents to bury dead poultry in lime pits.