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Forbes - The Hidden Outbreak

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  • Forbes - The Hidden Outbreak

    The Hidden Outbreak

    <cite>Vivian Wai-yin Kwok</cite>, 02.13.09, 10:45 AM EST

    Bird flu revealed to have killed a woman in China recently, raising questions about its prevalence in poultry flocks.

    China slaughtered more than 13,218 fowl in its northwestern Xinjiang Uighur autonomous region after 519 dead birds were confirmed to have contracted the H5N1 strain of bird flu, the state news agency Xinhua quietly disclosed on Tuesday night.
    Measures were taken, birds were killed, and the epidemic had been brought under control, Beijing's official mouthpiece said in a 75-word article. But is that it? The report, citing the Ministry of Agriculture, provided no details on when, where and how the virus had spread.


    About a month back, on Jan. 10, a 31-year-old woman surnamed Zhang from Urumqi, the capital of the Xinjiang Uighur region, fell ill after she bought a live chicken in a poultry market and later consumed it. The woman died of bird flu two weeks later. Urumqi is 570 miles north of Hetian, where the dead birds were recently found.

    Since the beginning of this year, seven people have been found to be infected with avian influenza across seven provinces in China, resulting in four deaths, including a 27-year-old woman in Shandong province, a 16-year-old male student from Guizhou province and an 18-year-old man in Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region.

    China has reported a total of 38 confirmed human cases of avian influenza with the World Health Organization since 2003. Although the number of human bird flu cases reported in the first two months of this year have already exceeded the total figures of 2008 (four cases) and 2007 (five), the Ministry of Agriculture had not disclosed any epidemic outbreak of the H5N1 strain in poultry before Tuesday. The Health Ministry insisted that the seven human cases this year appeared to be independent of any known case in birds, leaving the cause unexplained.
    “The human cases are proxy and [are] indicators showing something must have happened in China,” said Lo Wing-lok, an infectious disease expert of the H5N1 Concern Group in Hong Kong.
    Lo reckons that the H5N1 virus must have been circulating among wild and domestic bird populations, and its sudden appearance in poultry suggests inadequate surveillance or underreporting by Beijing authorities, or a silent carrier among fowl. “Any one of these possibilities poses a great threat to human beings,” Lo stressed.

    Zhong Nanshan, an expert at the Chinese Academy of Engineering who helped devise measures to control the spread of severe acute respiratory syndrome in China in 2003, has also warned that poultry can be infected with H5N1 virus without showing any symptoms since the existing vaccines can only reduce the amount of virus rather than completely eliminate it, according to Xinhua earlier this week.
    In the southern part of China, an extraordinary number of dead birds have drifted ashore in Hong Kong since January. Among them, 12 (including four chickens, a duck, a peregrine falcon and a gray heron) were confirmed to have contracted the deadly H5N1virus, almost doubled the confirmed cases last year, signaling there might be an unreported widespread incidence of bird flu in the Pearl River delta region.
    One of the casualties, a dead gray heron, was discovered earlier this month in Mai Po Nature Reserve, a bird sanctuary located in the northwestern corner of Hong Kong. There are about 1,000 to 1,500 gray herons resting in and around the Mai Po wetlands in January and early February. Bena Smith, the manager of Mai Po Nature Reserve, said these birds mostly migrate from northern and northwestern China, passing through Xinjiang, Yunnan and Sichuan provinces starting in September.
    "It is difficult to track down where the dead gray heron had contacted the H5N1 virus, but it is a reasonable guess that it would not be far away from Hong Kong. The disease appears to be disabling to birds, and thus it is highly unlikely to have been infected at the beginning of migration," said Smith.
    Lo of the H5N1 Concern Group urged Beijing to focus on the present epidemic, “as there is [an] unusual number of cases occurring within a short period of time.”


    Bird flu revealed to have killed a woman in China recently, raising questions about its prevalence in poultry flocks.
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