Family loses three children to bird flu in poor Turkish town

DOGUBAYAZIT, Turkey -- The mother wailed as the white shroud bearing the body of her 11-year-old daughter was lowered into a simple grave Friday, her third child to die in less than a week from bird flu. An imam in a surgical mask and rubber gloves read prayers.

Panic over bird flu has spread across this town beneath the snow-covered mountains of eastern Turkey near the Iranian border, with scared villagers bringing their children to the hospital at the first sign of any illness.

"Everyone wonders if they've got it," said Dr. Huseyin Yurtsever, who treated the children of Marifet and Zeki Kocyigit before sending them to a larger hospital in the city of Van, with high fevers, coughing and bleeding in their throats. The doctor said the children had played with the heads of chickens that died of bird flu.

Zeki Kocyigit said that when he took his four ailing children to Van, "It was really hard for them to breathe."

Mehmet Ali, 14, died first, on Sunday. Then, his 15-year-old sister, Fatma, died Thursday. Hulya, 11, died Friday and was buried beside her siblings.

A fourth Kocyigit child, 6-year-old Ali Hasan, is hospitalized in Van, but he has improved considerably and is no longer on a respirator.

"We're suffering," said an uncle, Hasan Kocyigit.

A British laboratory confirmed the Kocyigit teenagers suffered from bird flu, but tests have not been completed to determine if it was the H5N1 strain, the Turkish Health Ministry reported. If so, they would be the first people outside of East Asia to die in the latest outbreak of the H5N1 strain of the virus.

The strain has killed more than 70 people in East Asia since 2003. Authorities are closely monitoring H5N1 for fear it could mutate into a form easily passed among humans and spark a pandemic. Birds in Turkey, Romania, Russia and Croatia have recently tested positive for H5N1.

The World Health Organization also is conducting tests to check whether the bird flu cases resulted from human-to-human transmission, spokeswoman Fadela Chaib said in Geneva. Results are expected in a few days, she said.

The British lab also confirmed that another child, Yusuf Tunc, tested positive for bird flu, the Health Ministry said. It was unclear whether Tunc, who was reported to be hospitalized in serious condition in Van, had any connection to the Kocyigit children.

Apart from Tunc, 19 other people were hospitalized in Van with flu-like symptoms, while five were hospitalized in the southeastern city of Diyarbakir.

Yurtsever said the Kocyigit children most likely contracted the virus while playing with the heads of dead chickens. The children had reportedly tossed the chicken heads like balls inside their house.

Bird flu does not easily infect humans, and only those in close contact with poultry are at risk. In Dogubayazit, 750 miles east of Ankara, that's nearly everyone.

On the main streets of this town of 56,000 people, cars and trucks compete with carts bearing live animals and with flocks of sheep. The people of Dogubayazit are accustomed to living near their animals, and often it is the children who deal most with them. The people have seen their animals sicken before, but until now never thought it could put them in danger.

"They knew the animals were sick, but who knew it would kill them?" Hasan Kocyigit said.

Turks across the country hunted for the influenza medicine in pharmacies, while in the eastern part of Turkey, even simple gloves and masks were in high demand. Hospitals and clinics in eastern and southeastern parts of the country, where some H5N1 bird flu cases have been confirmed in fowl, were overwhelmed with people suffering from ordinary human flu.

The Health Ministry said more than 5,000 boxes of the antiviral drug Tamiflu were sent to eastern Turkey and five artificial respiration machines were also sent to the hospital in Van.

Less than three months ago, Turkey tackled a large outbreak of bird flu in a village in the west. No one there got sick, and the country was praised for its effective response.

Things are different in the eastern Turkey. Education is key to controlling the spread of the virus, but that is hampered by poverty and the inability of many in Dogubayazit, a largely Kurdish town, to speak Turkish.

Agriculture Minister Mehdi Eker said authorities have killed 14,000 fowl in 10 separate areas in eastern and southeastern Turkey.

Private CNN-Turk television reported that about 1,000 people sought medical help Friday at a hospital in Dogubayazit.

As teams dressed in protective suits went from backyard to backyard in Dogubayazit rounding up poultry for destruction, mourners trekked up the hill to the simple, concrete Kocyigit home. They took off their shoes before entering to sit with Marifet, the grieving mother.

Hutfetin Kocyigit, another uncle of the dead children, echoed the complaints of his neighbors that the local hospital was ineffective and the one in Van was too far away -- 120 miles over a sometimes barely visible road through a craggy chain of mountains that includes Mount Ararat, where Noah's ark is said to have landed after the Biblical great flood.

"If there were a hospital here, if they could have diagnosed it, maybe it would have been different," he said.