|
medpundit |
||
 |
 |
|
Sunday, January 08, 2006Two children and an adult have tested positive for the deadly H5N1 bird flu strain in Turkey's capital Ankara, the city's governor Kemal Onal has said. The results have not been confirmed by World Health Organization labs, but are still likely to trigger panic, says the BBC's Sarah Rainsford in Turkey. If confirmed they will be Turkey's first cases outside the eastern region of Van, about 1,000km (620 miles) away. Meanwhile two more children in Van have tested positive for H5N1, Mr Onal said. The patients don't live in Ankara, but about an hour away, in a town reported to have had bird flu in its ducks. There are also three suspected cases in Istanbul. They, too, are visitors who brought their own chickens from eastern Turkey to eat. It still looks as if the infections were transmitted bird-to-human rather than human-to-human. There are probably two reasons why Turkey is being especially hard hit - geography and animal husbandry practices: According to Veterinary Poultry Foundation President Professor Ahmet Ergun, there is an expectation of a bird flu outbreak in Eastern regions in Turkey and Turkey is always open to this threat due to the migrations. Poultry kept in the streets helps the spread of the disease, he added, asking this kind of poultry farming be banned. Underlining that the poultry sector will be negatively affected due to the bird flu disease, Professor Ergun said," The World Health Organization says there is no danger in consuming the poultry that comes to the market from integrated facilities." That would explain why there's a big gap with no cases of bird flu between East Asia and Turkey on the BBC Bird Flu Map. posted by Sydney on 1/08/2006 07:34:00 PM 0 comments 0 Comments: |
|
