The Turkmenistan government wishes the swine flu would just go away. Image by Flickr user Ben Chau.

Editor’s note: Has Turkmenistan come down with a bad case of the swine flu?  neweurasia’s Annasoltan investigates in this new post series on Turkmen healthcare.  Meanwhile, neweurasia’s Timur and Bakhrom debate whether the disease is a serious threat.  Read the rest of our ongoing coverage on the disease here.

The Turkmen authorities haven’t reported a single case of swine flu in the country.  Meanwhile, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), more than 200 countries have reported cases of pandemic influenza  H1N1, including over 6,000 deaths worldwide by mid-November.  Is Turkmenistan an oasis of health?

Don’t be fooled by this “miracle”.  The American author Mark Twain once said, “There’s lies, damn lies, and statistics”, and Turkmenistan is a country that proves him right.

But for once there’s a new twist to the same old story: of all the pandemics to sweep the globe in the last twenty years, this one seems to be giving the Turkmen authorities a serious headache.

Everything’s wonderful

Turkmenistan has a past record of bending statistics to promote an idyllic image of Turkmen society.  Public debate about social problems like drug addiction and human trafficking are banned.

Meanwhile, although doctors in the country say they have diagnosed some patients with HIV/AIDS, the government hasn’t issued any official statistics to date.  Because these patients are not on the state rolls, it is impossible for them to receive treatment, hence covering up their existence.

A Turkmen political analyst has remarked to me, on condition of anonymity:

It’s the stupid policy continuing since the Niyazov’s years. The denial is a way of saying, ‘We are a clean people, we have no problems,’ to easily skip from responsibility on the international scene.

It’s a paradox: because Turkmenistan fails to report the disease, the country skips from getting reported upon — which is precisely what the government wants.  Yet, normally, such a failure of reporting should make observers all the more curious to find out; instead, the opposite is happening, again, precisely because it is too difficult to figure out.

Take two pills of denial and call me in the morning

Gregory Hartl, the WHO’s spokesman for epidemic and pandemic diseases, says that Turkmenistan is one of the few countries where no cases have yet been reported.  So, is history repeating itself?  Not if the swine flu itself has anything to say about it.

For several weeks now rumors have been cooking about swine flu-related deaths.  According to Farid Tuhbatullin, the head of the Vienna-based Turkmen Human Rights Initiative, possibly four people have died in Ashgabad.

A 2 November report from the Initiative’s news wing, the Chronicles of Turkmenistan, stated that rumors place the total number of fatalities at 100.  Meanwhile, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s Turkmen service has quoted a doctor at the S. Niyazov hospital in Ashgabad as saying that 27 people have died.

The Turkmen government has been characteristically in complete denial.  On 5 November the State News Agency declared,

No cases of A/H1N1 influenza has been reported in Turkmenistan.  Since there has been detected no cases of A/H1N1 influenza in the country, there is no need to conduct mass vaccination of the population.

Indeed, the above Chronicles article reports,

Teachers at schools are urged to appease schoolchildren. The only thing that the educators are allowed to say to schoolchildren: ‘Do not believe the gossip’.

Tuhbatullin remarks,

The authorities are worried that if word on the swine flu outbreak gets out it could crate panic among the population.

The country is ill-equipped to cope with a massive outbreak of flu virus.  In 1998, Niyazov reduced the number of medical workers in the country by 10,000 and closed all of the hospitals and medical service points in the villages.  Healthcare funding was redirected toward maintaining his personality cult.

Today, the country severely lacks medical specialists, equipment, vaccines, and drugs to deal with such an outbreak.  It seems the government hopes it can deny the disease away.

But for once this is not happening.  This disease — or rather, people’s fear of it — cannot simply be denied.  In tomorrow’s post I will detail what’s really going on in the country.