Carbon monoxide poisoning in Antalya: Mother and her baby lose their lives

* News and photo: Anadolu Agency (AA)

Click to read the article in Turkish

In the district of Serik in Turkey's Mediterranean province of Antalya, a mother and her 1-year-old baby have lost their lives due to carbon monoxide poisoning. Affected by the gas leaking from the heating stove, the father and 5-year-old daughter were also hospitalized.

As their neighbors could not reach Ferhat and Yasemin Yüceay by phone, they went to their house in Kadriye Neighborhood. Since they did not open the door, the neighbors called the police.

Police went into the house and found the mother and 1-year-old baby in the bedroom and the father and 5-year-old daughter on the floor unconscious in another room. The father and the daughter were taken to a hospital. After the deceased bodies were examined by a prosecutor, they were sent to the mortuary of the Antalya Forensic Medicine Institution for the autopsy.

Father Yüceay was reportedly working at a hotel and after he tested positive for COVID-19, the family were in a quarantine at home for 3 days.

The deceased bodies of the mother and the baby were given to their relatives after the autopsy. The relatives have taken them to Turkey's southeastern province of Mardin to lay them to rest there.

The father and daughter are still in treatment at the hospital.

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'Much more difficulties in getting warm'

Speaking to bianet following the deadly fire that claimed the lives of four children in İstanbul's Esenyurt, Selen Yüksel from the Deep Poverty Network previously stressed that this winter, heating houses became all the more difficult and problematic as a result of recent increase in prices:

"The Article 6 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which Turkey is a party to, recognizes every child's inherent right to life and says: 'States Parties shall ensure to the maximum extent possible the survival and development of the child.' And Article 27 says that every child has a right to a standard of living adequate for her or his development.

"When poverty gets deeper, we see that several children are unable to access the rights necessary for an adequate standard of living such as healthy nutrition, a safe house, heating and medical needs.

"In 2021, 92 percent of the households that are a part of the Deep Poverty Network get warm by using heating stoves. We observe that this winter, families have much more difficulties in getting warm. As they cannot buy something to burn in the stoves, we receive more phone calls.

"The households that we follow say that the coal distributed by the sub-governor's office doesn't burn and they are having difficulty in finding something to burn. They say that when they cannot find anything to burn for getting warm, they use the waste that they can find, which brings about the risk that their respiratory system suffers long-term damage and a risk of fire and poisoning in the short term. Some families keep on using old and defective heating stoves because they cannot buy a new one.

"They cannot benefit from the stoves distributed by the sub-governor's office once in two years because it has not yet been two years since the previous support and that their residential address is not where they live because they live in tents/ under a bender, which leads them to use the defective heaters, thereby being exposed to a life risk." (AÖ/SD)