ANKARA, 1 July 2006 — A tick-borne disease has killed 11 people in Turkey, causing public alarm, but the government said yesterday that the country is a long way from an epidemic.
“There is a wave of panic which must be overcome,” said senior Health Ministry official Turan Buzgan, adding that the 150 cases of Crimea-Congo hemorrhagic fever recorded so far this year were comparable with last year’s total of 266.
Buzgan, a medical doctor, said that since 2003, when the disease first surfaced in Turkey, 43 people had died, mainly in central Anatolia, making a death rate of some five percent of cases. He urged anyone who thought they had been bitten by a tick to consult a doctor, in line with recommendations in the tens of thousands of leaflets distributed by the health ministry, mainly in the rural areas primarily affected.
The disease, related to the deadlier Ebola fever, cannot be cured by treatment but Turkish newspapers carry almost daily articles advising readers how to deal with ticks. Dozens of anxious people have been swarming hospitals in the areas concerned, while in the Istanbul area 15 children were quarantined complaining of tick bites.
Infants’ schools in the capital Ankara have canceled visits to the zoo and picnics in the open air. Crimea-Congo fever was first described in 1944 in the Crimean peninsula, but it is not known how it crossed the Black Sea to Turkey. The Congo appellation was added in 1969 when it was realized the same disease had been found in central Africa in 1956.
Meanwhile, two Turkish soldiers were killed and five wounded in an attack by Kurdish rebels on a gendarmerie post in the eastern province of Bingol, local authorities said yesterday.
The attack late Thursday in the mountain location of Yeniyazi was blamed on the Kurdish separatist Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).
The PKK, blacklisted as a terrorist group by Turkey, the European Union and the United States, has stepped up its violent campaign this year. The Kurdish conflict in Turkey has claimed more than 37,000 lives since 1984 when the PKK took up arms for self-rule in the mainly Kurdish southeast.
In another development, veteran Turkish politician Bulent Ecevit, who has been in an artificial coma for six weeks after a brain hemorrhage, has opened his eyes, his wife said yesterday. “He opened his eyes and showed a few reactions,” Rahsan Ecevit told journalists.
“Bulent’s improving health is giving us hope.” The elite GATA military hospital has regularly issued bulletins on the state of the five-time former prime minister who is 82, but none was published yesterday.
