CHINA: China, home to a vast poultry industry, said yesterday that the deadly bird flu virus which has killed eight Asians had struck in three provinces, possibly two more and perhaps the sprawling financial capital of Shanghai.
It said tests confirmed that the H5N1 virus had got into chickens in Hubei and Hunan provinces as well as the southern region of Guanxi. Outbreaks were also suspected in Anhui and Guangdong, the southern province where Sars was born.
There was another suspected outbreak in a suburb of Shanghai, and a mass slaughter of domestic fowl was under way around all three new outbreaks, the official Xinhua news agency said.
Outbreaks in China, which was widely condemned for covering up Sars for several months, were the nightmare health officials had prayed they would not have to face.
Especially in Guangdong, people live in close proximity to their chickens and other farm animals, raising the possibility that the virus might combine with human flu to produce a strain that could sweep through a world where people have no immunity to it.
Hong Kong, just south of Guangdong, banned imports of live birds and poultry meat from mainland China shortly after the new outbreaks were reported.
So far all eight people, seven of them children, known to have died from bird flu have caught it directly from infected chickens, victims of a virus probably spread by migrating birds.
But the generation of a new flu virus that can pass from person to person is the overwhelming fear, and while the possibility is small, every outbreak shortens the odds of a pandemic a little.
There were hopes of better news from Thailand, so far the worst hit of 10 Asian countries struck by bird flu, which hopes it may be turning the corner in the war against the disease.
But the UN Food and Agricultural Organisation said mass slaughters, which it said were the most effective way of preventing a human flu pandemic, were not happening fast enough. - (Reuters)