Ankara, Turkey – Turkey raced to contain an outbreak of bird flu Tuesday, destroying 300,000 fowl and blaring warnings from mosque loudspeakers, after preliminary tests showed that at least 15 people have been infected with the deadly H5N1 strain.
As the country recorded the first human deaths outside eastern Asia, jittery European governments stepped up border checks and hosed down Turkish trucks with disinfectant.
Fifteen cases in one week is a record for the current outbreak. Never before has such a high number of cases been seen in such a short time in Asia, where 76 people have died since 2003.
European governments, scrambling to avoid the specter of a mutation that could trigger a pandemic capable of killing millions, sprayed trucks from Turkey with disinfectant.
Health officials said Tuesday that most of the 70 or so people hospitalized with flulike symptoms had tested negative for bird flu.
In Italy, a consumer group urged the government to impose a ban on travel to Turkey, and in Greece, veterinary inspectors stepped up border checks.
Underscoring the vulnerability that neighboring countries feel, Bulgaria began issuing its citizens special instructions on how to deal with an outbreak.
Turkey’s government was anxious to show its citizens and the European Union that it was taking decisive action.
“Everything is under control,” said Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, adding that Turkey had no shortage of vaccine or medicines.
Erdogan spoke during a visit by Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi of Japan, whose government said Tuesday that up to 77 Japanese – most of them workers at chicken farms – may have become infected by H5N2, a less potent strain not previously known to infect humans.
The bird-flu outbreak comes at a difficult time for Turkey.
The country has been eager to join the EU and is working to improve an image marred by allegations of human rights abuses against minority Kurds.
Guenael Rodier, a senior World Health Organization official for communicable diseases, said Tuesday that the Turkish outbreak appeared to be confined to cases in which the illness spread from birds to humans, rather than person to person.
“It seems to be clear that we are dealing with a situation similar to what we have seen in Asia, which means in practice a number of small sites, family clusters of disease involving many children and always with documented or reported contact with infected birds, typically backyard poultry,” he said.
