Posted on 01/14/2006 5:55:56 PM PST by blam
Chickens run rings around Turkish bird flu busters
Colin Freeman in Kusadasi
(Filed: 15/01/2006)
For the boiler-suited bird flu team from Kusadasi town council, the question of why the chicken crossed the road was no laughing matter.
Having pecked his way out of a wriggling sackful of condemned birds, the white cockerel sprinted from the council depot and across a dual carriageway, forcing several staff to dodge the rush-hour traffic in pursuit.
A Turkish boy and a municipality worker try to catch chickens
The chicken's escape was thwarted only by Ayhan Bekmez, one of 90 council staff pressed into service as poultry catchers in the resort on Turkey's Aegean coast.
He sidled up to the bird as it perched tauntingly on a wall, shot his arm out like a cobra and grabbed it by the neck.
"I was brought up in a village, so I know how to chase chickens," said Mr Bekmez, 37, as masked colleagues sprayed him with more disinfectant. "But I love animals so it makes me sad to do this. It is coming from God - what can we do?"
Divine intervention or otherwise, Kusadasi has feared for its future as one of Turkey's favourite tourist spots since bird flu was detected here last Sunday.
A day later, a three-year-old local boy was taken to hospital after showing possible signs of the human version of the virus. Although he was cleared, he was just one of eight suspected cases in the south-west region.
Admittedly, for most of Kusadasi's winter tourists, the only noticeable difference is that most seafront restaurants have taken chicken kebabs off the menu.
Yet the fact that Kusadasi's name is in the headlines has alarmed town hall officials, who fear that tens of thousands of regular summer visitors - including many Britons - could choose to book elsewhere.
To head off the threat, a small army of council staff - most are not pest control experts, but labourers, cleaners and handymen - have been recruited to capture and kill Kusadasi's entire poultry stock.
With their makeshift, mismatched overalls and occasional antics chasing escaped birds, it is easy to see it as a Keystone Cops operation. But the council manager directing the team, Nedret Salbas, bristles at any such suggestion.
A former petty officer on a Turkish navy warship, he is fighting not just for Kusadasi's future but for the pride of the Turkish nation - which, he claims, has been unfairly maligned over its response to the crisis.
"Whenever something like this happens, people say we Turks are amateurs and unprofessional," said Mr Salbas.
"For example, nobody criticised Germany when that ice rink collapsed there last week, killing many people - yet if it had happened here, they would have said, 'Typical goddam Turks'. This is like the Black Death for chickens - but my staff are doing a good job."
Certainly, Mr Salbas has brought a military bearing to the problem. While the rest of the town hall is deserted because of a public holiday, his own quarters resemble the bridge of a warship, its commander-in-chief barking orders on a radio to 17 teams of roving bird catchers.
Some staff stand to attention as they hand over lists of addresses that have been cleared of poultry and disinfected.
When the operation began, Mr Salbas worked 44 hours straight, fuelled largely by strong Turkish coffee and cigarettes.
"So far we have killed about 8,000 chickens and we should be done by the end of this weekend," he said. "The only problem is when the chickens are free range - then it takes several hours just to catch 20."
Even snaring captive specimens can be tricky. At a small seaside restaurant, the owner had reported a dead bird in his 6ft-long coop. It took five minutes of poking with a stick, during which potentially infectious droppings showered everywhere, to hustle the rest of the flock into a sack.
Once captured, the birds are taken by truck to a dump outside town, where they are buried in a pit which is bulldozed over with quicklime.
Nationwide, more than 350,000 birds have been culled, but neighbouring nations such as Greece, Bulgaria and Iran are anticipating that the disease will spread to them.
So far three infected children have died in eastern Turkey and 15 more people nationwide have tested positive, although officials said they were being treated with antivirals and were not in a critical condition.
Back at the town hall, Mr Salbas's spin operation went into overdrive as he briefed a sceptical reporter from Greece - Turkey's historical enemy - about the measures being taken to combat the disease.
Compensation, he claimed, would soon be paid out to all chicken owners to discourage them from secretly hoarding stocks - although there is no sign of such an announcement from the Turkish government.
Mr Salbas was confident that come the summer, the only thing flocking around Kusadasi would be foreign tourists. "Tourists returned to Indonesia after the tsunami, and they still go to Egypt after hundreds have died from the terrorists' gun. It's very early in the season and I am sure that, by summer, everything will be fine."
Well, you can certainly see why it might be hard to contain something spread by chickens - they have no brain whatsoever, but they can move really, really fast!
I read something in the Spanish press this a.m. about a suspected bird-flu case in Belgium. The patient is a Turkish journalist who had just returned to Belgium from a visit to one of the infected areas.
Current Bird Flu Outbreak In Turkey Began In Mid-November, Not Mid-December
That story is contained in the articles in my post #3.
I suggest they contact one of the US poultry growers and contract some of their chicken catchers to round up the birds.
There are over 100,000 chickens in the houses diagonally across the road from me. They haul chickens out of there about every 8 weeks. in nearly 3 years I have not seen one single escaped chicken.
"Once captured, the birds are taken by truck to a dump outside town, where they are buried in a pit which is bulldozed over with quicklime."
What is quicklime and why is it used like this? I tried doing a google search but didn't turn up much about it being used in this kind of situation.
"Many more jobs could go abroad as big companies seek to minimise the potentially devastating impact of the virus that has already travelled from the Far East to Turkey, on the doorstep of Europe."
That's because they always escape at night while you are asleep.
Years ago I worked for a producer, and I got to watch some of them in action.
The best catcher on the team was an older fellow with only one arm. . . . he caught more chickens with one arm than most of them could with two. He demonstrated how he reached into the coop and "stirred" the chickens to disorient them, then grabbed a handful. Amazing.
I'm doomed..........I work at home and am surrounded by chicken houses and processing plants..............
Actually, they do much of the catching at night :)
People are starting to take this seriously. Do we have any areas of outbreak, where the people are not basically living with the birds?
Seems like all the cases are where there is a close tie-in.
I'm not so sure I would want to see them in action.
The husband of a friend of mine is a manager for one of the big growers around here, I hear some wild stories from her about what happens when they are ready to load the chickens to take them to the plant.
It's about time, and a good thing, too.
Odor control.
Hope this doesn't turn into a hurricanne....lol. How you been?
Can you answer my question in post #8. Seems like all the outbreaks are in areas where people and poultry live together.
Sorry, the question was in post #13.
LOL
I follow this pretty closely and all cases I have heard of are related to handling birds of some type.
The BIG moment will be when there is a human to human transmission which hasn't happened yet. There are reports of people who have the H5N1 virus without any symptoms. I view that as good news.
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