252 Blood Samples in Hunan Taken for Bird Flu Testing

252 blood samples in Hunan taken for bird flu testing

CHANGSHA, Nov. 17 (Xinhua) — Blood samples of 252 people who had contact with human bird flu cases in central China’s Hunan Province have been taken and sent to the national Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) for testing, local health authorities said Thursday.

The results have not come out yet, according to the provincial CDC.

China’s health authorities confirmed the first two human cases of bird flu in the country Wednesday evening. The two confirmed cases involve a nine-year-old boy in Xiangtan County of Hunan Province and a 24-year-old woman farmer in Zongyang County of Anhui Province.

Meanwhile, the Ministry of Health reported the boy’s 12-year-old sister, who had similar symptoms as her brother and died on Oct. 17, as a suspected human case of bird flu infection due to insufficient evidence of laboratory tests.

Blood samples of the people who had close contact with the two cases in Hunan have been sent to the national CDC in Beijing. They include veterinarians and workers who handled dead poultry in Xiangtan County, medical workers at the provincial children’s hospital where the boy was treated and cured and the Xiangtan central hospital where a schoolteacher is hospitalized, and farmers in Wantang village where the boy comes from, according to Peng Zaizhi, deputy director of the provincial CDC.

Gao Lidong with the provincial CDC said that bird flu virus testing must be conducted under laboratory conditions that meet the requirements for Biosafety Level 3 (BSL3) and local labs currently cannot meet these requirements. “If bird flu antibodies are detected, there’s a great possibility of latent virus in these people.”