CHICKENS splash in the mud among the rain-soaked shanties of the Kucukcekmece district of Istanbul. They face death in municipal gas chambers — if anyone can catch them.

A team of 20 men in special suits moves purposefully among the buildings, collecting domestic fowl to be culled, but many remain at large as night falls. Not all the owners are co-operative — one man tore off the head of his pigeon rather than hand it over, while another chased his hens away as the culling team approached.

“If they want my birds they can pay for them,” mutters a burly man, part of the large crowd watching the operation, reluctant to surrender his livelihood so easily. “Do you want your children dead then?” a young woman reprimands him.

The cull is part of measures to rid Turkey’s largest city of the bird flu virus which has been recorded as spreading rapidly across the country since three children in eastern Turkey died of the disease last week, becoming the first human victims of the deadly H5N1 avian flu virus outside East Asia.

Children are among the 12 people being treated for confirmed avian flu in the country. There are another 78 suspected cases. The appearance of the virus in Istanbul brings it to the easternmost point of the European landmass.

There are no human cases so far here, but the capital Ankara was hit at the weekend: two young boys and a pensioner who kept chickens are in hospital. The boys have proved positive for the virus, even though they show no symptoms. They appear to have contracted it after playing with gloves used by their father and uncle to handle two infected dead wild ducks. Dozens more are under observation in hospitals — from the eastern city of Van, where the children died, to northwestern Istanbul. Several hundred panicky people have been to hospital “just in case”.

There was some good news for the Kocyigit family from eastern Dogubeyazit province, who lost three children to bird flu: their six-year-old son, Ali Hasan, has been declared free of the virus. “This is my whole world,” Marifet Kocyigit said as she hugged her son on the doorstep of her house. “It’s like I’m forgetting everything.”

The boy does not know yet that his older brother Mehmet, 14, and his two sisters, Fatma, 15, and Hulya, 11, are dead. The children had been seen playing with the head of a sick chicken, from which they are believed to have contracted the disease.

Ali Hasan did not succumb to bird flu, but had been hospitalised with his siblings on New Year’s Eve. He was released from the hospital in Van yesterday and brought 120 miles over difficult, snowy roads to his home in Dogubayazit, the last Turkish town before the Iranian border.

So far more than 100,000 birds have been killed in 11 eastern provinces, but yesterday it was the turn of Istanbul, where about a sixth of the population lives. Muammer Guler, the governor, has declared a quarantine zone and mass culls in three districts, including Kucukcekmece, while a further six districts around water reservoirs are under observation. “We urge you not to touch domestic fowl in the areas marked out for culling. Shut up their coops and wait for the culling teams to arrive,” Mr Guler said.

Although health officials are nervously watching for any signs that the virus has mutated into a form that can pass from human to human, so far all cases in Turkey involve direct contact with infected birds.

The way to stop the spread, they say, is seemingly simple but almost impossible to implement: to put an end to the haphazard method of rearing birds in backyards, streets, even in homes, which can be seen mainly in rural Turkey but also in shanty suburbs such as Kucukcekmece. The belief is that such freeranging poultry can easily come into contact with infected migratory birds.

“Since our country is on the migration route we may well come across this issue in the years to come,” Recep Akdag, the Health Minister, said. “Therefore we must consign the idea of ‘village hens’ and ‘village eggs’ to history.”

Advice is plentiful. The Agriculture Ministry has prepared a public information film giving warning of the dangers of keeping and slaughtering one’s own birds. Newspapers urge people to avoid all contact with birds, to buy pre-packaged poultry products only and to look out for symptoms of the flu.

The press has been full of shocked articles about people from impoverished areas still handling poultry. The coverage has scared some into drastic action, including families who shoved their live chickens into bags and threw them into the street and those who hurled dead poultry into a stream.

People now are terrified by birds. In the town of Sakarya, residents were stranded outside when a small duck got into the stairway of their flats. One district after another is banning the sale of unpackaged bird meat and eggs, but local markets are slow to put this into practice. The cull has sparked defiance in some, reluctant to destroy their source of food and income, and distrustful of official pledges of compensation.

In Zonguldak, a northern province on the Black Sea, television showed a district agriculture official berating villagers who had failed to shut up their hens. “You had better all drop dead then!” he yelled in his frustration. “You drop dead,” the men yelled back.

A man from Van told one newspaper that he would rather hand over his wives than his chickens.

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