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Unlicensed Vaccine Blamed for Bird Flu Outbreak in China's Laioning

Posted on: Saturday, 12 November 2005, 06:00 CST

Excerpt from report by Josephine Ma in Beijing entitled: "Rogue vaccine blamed for Liaoning outbreak"; published by Hong Kong newspaper South China Morning Post website on 12 November

Drugs salesmen who smuggled out an unlicensed vaccine still being tested, and sold it on the market, have been blamed for the massive outbreak of bird flu in Liaoning Province.

The situation was compounded by local authorities who first diagnosed the outbreak in Heishan county - where bird flu has spread to at least 18 villages - as Newcastle disease, a highly contagious viral disease of birds, China Business News reported.

It was later confirmed as H5N1 in Harbin. The report said the vaccine still undergoing clinical tests was the culprit for the rapid spread of the disease in Liaoning, where more than 3 million birds have been culled.

Farmers in infected areas said they had already vaccinated their poultry against H5N1 but large numbers had still died. [passage omitted]

The company issued a statement on Thursday saying its salesmen had smuggled the vaccine for sales in the market. After the outbreak the company's licence to produce veterinary medicine was suspended and the firm admitted some of the vaccine was sold to Heishan, although it said the amount remained small.

Separately, the semi-official China News Service, quoting the Ministry of Agriculture, reported that an Inner Mongolia drugs factory had produced vaccines for Newcastle disease, infectious bronchitis and the H9N2 and H5N28 strains of bird flu without a licence.

"The use of the vaccine by some chicken farmers in Heishan, where the outbreak had spread to at least 18 villages, has failed to immunise the poultry against the outbreak," the report said.

It was also sold to provinces including Henan and Gansu, the report said.

Meanwhile, Xiao Bingnan, director of the Hunan Veterinary Research Institute, said local authorities lacked the technology to conduct lab tests of H5N1 and it usually took 10 to 15 days to confirm the results after samples were sent to Harbin Veterinary Research Institute - the only mainland laboratory authorised to conduct tests.

Source: BBC Monitoring Asia Pacific

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