Announcement

Collapse
No announcement yet.

China searches for 150 people after first flu case

Collapse
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

  • China searches for 150 people after first flu case

    Posted under Hongkong (Need China sub forum)

    BEIJING (Reuters) - Chinese health authorities are searching for around 150 people who took the same flights as mainland China's first confirmed case of the new H1N1 strain of flu, state media said on Monday.
    Policemen keep guard in front of a hospital where a Chinese man is quarantined, the first confirmed case of the new H1N1 strain of flu in mainland China, in Chengdu, Sichuan province May 11, 2009. (REUTERS/Stringer)

    State television said the government had tracked down about 150 people who flew with the 30-year-old man first from Tokyo to Beijing and then from Beijing to the Sichuan provincial capital Chengdu, but another 150 or so were unaccounted for.

    Those found had been placed in quarantine, Xinhua news agency said. As for foreign nationals on those flights, authorities were "persuading them to take quarantine measures", it added.

    None of those placed in quarantine had so far shown flu symptoms, the report said.

    The patient himself, a Chinese student in the U.S. state of Missouri, was doing well.

    "The patient has already been quarantined at the Chengdu Infectious Disease Hospital. At present his body temperature is normal and he has started to recover. His spirits are good," the Health Ministry said in a statement on its website (www.moh.gov.cn).

    The man's girlfriend, father and a taxi driver had also been quarantined, Xinhua said.

    The man took a Northwest Airlines flight from Minneapolis/St Paul, Minnesota, which stopped in Tokyo and landed at Beijing. He also took a flight on Sichuan Airlines from Beijing to Chengdu.

    "Obviously they have done this before," said Peter Reilly, a Briton working for information provider Thomson Reuters in Tokyo who was quarantined with his wife and more than 100 others in Beijing and won't get out until the end of the week. "I am completely confident that they are able to handle it."

    A Washington state man with H1N1 influenza died last week, health officials said, the third U.S. sufferer to die as the new flu strain confirmed in more than 2,200 Americans appeared in Japan and Australia.

    A Mexican traveller confirmed as Hong Kong's first and only case of the new flu strain was discharged from hospital at the end of last week.

    The former British colony has been a special administrative region of China since 1997.

    China has vowed to disclose any human cases of the new fever promptly, while state-run newspapers have urged officials to be open and avoid the kind of cover-ups that brought panic during the SARS epidemic in 2003.

    Experts have expressed worries in recent weeks about the massive problems that would ensue in vast countries like China or India.

    While there have been improvements in recent years, their health infrastructure is still seen as rudimentary and would be hard pressed to cope with any huge rise in hospital admissions.

    Worse, the highly lethal H5N1 bird flu virus is endemic in these areas and experts fear that a hybrid packed with enormous killing power and capable of efficient human to human transmission may emerge if this new H1N1 strain were to get mixed up genetically with the H5N1.

    Seasonal flu kills 250,000 to 500,000 people globally and infects up to a third of the population every year
Working...
X