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China Announces 10th Human Case of Bird Flu

Posted on: Monday, 23 January 2006, 11:50 CST

By Chris Buckley

BEIJING -- China's Ministry of Health announced the country's 10th human case of bird flu infection on Monday after a 29-year-old woman from the southwest of the country was diagnosed with the H5N1 virus.

The woman, surnamed Cao, ran a dry goods shop in a farm goods market in Jinhua Town in Sichuan Province, a notice on the ministry's website said.

Jinhua lies in the rural outskirts of Chengdu, the provincial capital, which has a total population of close to 10 million, including many farmers.

She was the province's second human case of bird flu this month, after the Chinese health ministry announced on Wednesday that a 35-year-old woman from there died of it on January 11.

Cao fell ill with a fever on January12 and is now in a critical condition in a Chengdu hospital. She tested positive to tests for the H5N1 virus given by the provincial disease control center, and the national center confirmed this.

To date, six of the 10 Chinese people officially confirmed to have contracted bird flu have died. The latest fatal infection was in Dazhu County, Sichuan, 300 kilometers (190 miles) east of Chengdu.

The announcement came as the senior Chinese official in charge of fighting bird flu warned the country faces a growing threat over coming weeks.

Vice Premier Hui Liangyu told a conference of Chinese officials charged with fighting bird flu that they "must fully grasp the grave trends for avian flu in the Lunar New Year and early spring season," the official Xinhua News Agency reported.

NEW YEAR THREAT

Hui said that many Chinese are traveling for the traditional Lunar New Year holiday starting January 29. Many families will eat poultry as part of the celebrations, and birds will start breeding and migrating as winter ends, he said.

"This is a time of frequent outbreaks of avian flu, and prevention and control work is facing new tests," Hui said.

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.

The ministry announcement did not say what kind of contact Cao may have had with birds. Chinese dry goods stores typically sell nuts, herbs, seeds and grain, but not poultry.

In this latest case, and most of China's other reported bird flu infections of people, there was no officially confirmed outbreak of H5N1 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 spreading and infecting more people, including a campaign to vaccinate all domestic poultry.

But officials say the preponderance of small family farms, a lack of well-trained local officials and the world's biggest poultry population will make it hard to contain the disease.

Source: REUTERS

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