Human bird flu cases found in China

By Brian Rhoads

BEIJING (Reuters) – Bird flu has killed at least one person
in China, officials said on Wednesday, confirming the spread of
the deadly virus into people in another large Asian country
where it might prove hard to contain.

One victim in eastern Anhui had died and another in the
central province of Hunan was suspected of having been killed
by the deadly H5N1 strain of bird flu, China’s official Xinhua
news agency reported.

A second person diagnosed with bird flu in Hunan had
recovered, it said.

The deadly H5N1 form of bird flu has already killed more
than 60 people in Asia and is endemic in poultry in parts of
the region. The previous confirmed deaths were in Vietnam,
Thailand, Indonesia and Cambodia.

The virus remains hard for people to catch and is still
essentially a disease in birds. However, experts fear H5N1
could mutate into a form that passes easily among people, just
like human influenza, putting millions of lives at risk.

World Health Organization (WHO) spokesman Roy Wadia said it
was no surprise that bird flu had spread to humans in the
world’s most populous nation.

“It’s not a surprise. It shows that China like other
countries that have bird flu in poultry can have human cases,”
Wadia said.

China has been trying to contain about a dozen outbreaks of
the deadly H5N1 strain of the bird flu virus among poultry in
at least six provinces in the past month.

Xinhua identified the Anhui victim as a 24-year-old woman
surnamed Zhou, who fell ill on November 1 and died on November
10. She had had contact with dead chickens and geese on her
family farm.

The WHO said China had informed it that a 9-year-old boy
from Hunan province suspected of having bird flu was indeed
stricken by the H5N1 virus.

His 12-year-old sister, who fell ill and died in October,
had H5N1 antibodies and most likely succumbed to bird flu,
Xinhua and WHO spokesman Wadia said. The children had close
contact with infected poultry, Wadia said.

Chinese officials initially reported that the two children
in Hunan had suffered pneumonia and not bird flu, but later
invited international experts to help confirm the cases. The
boy was discharged from hospital over the weekend.

ASIA PLANS

Asian countries are scrambling to halt the spread of bird
flu, with mass cullings of birds and vaccination of poultry.
China on Tuesday announced plans to vaccinate billions of
birds.

Dr Robert Webster, an influenza expert at St Jude
Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis Tennessee, said it was
too late for a large-scale cull of poultry in countries like
China.

“Poultry vaccines are the key,” Webster told a meeting of
the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.

Migratory flocks have carried the virus into birds in
eastern Europe and Kuwait and experts believe it will soon
reach Africa.

European Union veterinary experts on Wednesday extended a
ban on imports of captive live birds for a further two months
to guard against the spread of bird flu.

ROCHE DEAL

The main producer of Tamiflu, the drug believed to be the
best defense against a possible flu pandemic, has settled a
dispute with the drug’s inventor over production and royalties.

Governments have been seeking to stockpile Tamiflu but
Swiss drug maker Roche has come under pressure over concerns
that production could fall short.

The drug’s inventor, U.S. company Gilead Sciences, will get
a greater say in plans to increase production of the drug by
farming out parts of the process to third-party producers such
as generic drug makers.

(Additional reporting by Ho Binh Minh in Hanoi, Rahul
Sharma in Singapore, Joel Kirkhart in Beijing and Tom Armitage
in Zurich)