Chinese woman dies from bird flu: WHO

BEIJING (Reuters) – A Chinese woman infected with bird flu,
the country’s 10th human bird flu victim, has died, the World
Health Organization confirmed on Wednesday.

The 29-year-old woman surnamed Cao, who ran a shop in a
farm goods market in Jinhua town in the southwestern province
of Sichuan, died on Monday, Roy Wadia, a WHO spokesman in
Beijing, said.

Cao fell ill with a fever on January 12 and had been
receiving treatment in a hospital in the provincial capital,
Chengdu. She was Sichuan’s second human case of bird flu this
month, after the Chinese health ministry announced last week
that a 35-year-old woman from the province died of the disease
on January 11.

To date, seven of the 10 Chinese people officially
confirmed to have contracted bird flu have died.

China’s Ministry of Health was not immediately available
for comment.

In Cao’s case, and most of China’s other reported human
bird flu infections, there was no officially confirmed outbreak
of the H5N1 strain of bird flu among poultry in the area
beforehand.

China, along with Vietnam, has suffered numerous outbreaks
in poultry since October and Beijing has launched sweeping
measures to stop the virus from spreading and infecting more
people.

Experts believe the H5N1 virus is contracted through close
contact with sick birds, and fear that as the virus spreads it
will mutate to enable it to spread easily from human to human,
sparking a pandemic that could claim many millions of lives.