Days after the 6 February 2023 earthquakes, Hans Kluge walked through the temporary shelters in Hatay and Gaziantep. The medical teams he found there, he said this week, were "among the best equipped I have seen anywhere, treating people who had lost everything. I will never forget it."
Kluge, the World Health Organization's regional director for Europe, was speaking in Istanbul at a WHO ministerial conference on protecting health when earthquakes strike, co-hosted with Türkiye's Health Ministry and drawing ministers, deputies and experts from more than 40 countries and four of the WHO's regions. His verdict on the host was direct: Türkiye is a model for the rest of the world.
The number he kept returning to was 50,000. "More than 50,000 patients were immediately moved to safety by helicopter," Kluge said of the 2023 response. "This capacity had been built beforehand. This was preparedness." The teams, he said, reached survivors within hours.
That is the argument the conference was built to make. The 2023 earthquakes taught hard lessons, Kluge said, including that hospitals and clinics can themselves collapse when the ground moves. But building a hospital to survive a quake adds only 1% to 4% to its cost and "pays back more than four times over," which makes readiness, in his words, a "very smart" investment. "Preparedness cannot wait for disaster."
The gathering is meant to produce an "Istanbul Declaration," which Kluge called the strongest yet in the field, on the grounds that it was written with ministers and experts who had lived through disasters rather than drafted in theory.
He framed the praise inside Türkiye's wider habit of sharing what it learns. He thanked it for sending emergency medical teams to Venezuela after last week's earthquake there, "which very concretely demonstrates how the country shares its experience with the rest of the world." He recalled that Türkiye sent COVID-19 vaccines when he asked, at a time when many governments were keeping theirs. And he said he had personally given President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan the first WHO award of its kind for Türkiye's work evacuating severely wounded and critically ill children from Gaza. "Türkiye has always shared its lessons transparently so other countries can learn," he said.
Health Minister Kemal Memişoğlu said Türkiye treats passing on its disaster experience as a humanitarian responsibility, and would keep supporting countries in crisis with its people and its institutions. "Health is a universal value beyond borders," he said.
Kluge left the ministers with the reason the figures matter. "Behind every figure is a person, a family and a life that has changed forever."