China steps up watch against bird flu
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China is stepping up surveillance of migratory birds and poultry markets, has canceled pigeon races and stocked up on protective clothing to check the spread of bird flu, a state newspaper said on Monday.
Three areas hit by bird flu in the provinces of Hunan and Anhui and the northern region of Inner Mongolia remained closed to outsiders, the official English-language China Daily said.
Medical staff in eastern Shanghai, the country’s financial hub, were being trained to deal with an outbreak and hospitals were stockpiling emergency materials like disinfectant.
China on Friday reported to the World Health Organization (WHO) the death of a 12-year-old girl who ate a diseased chicken in the southern province of Hunan and caught pneumonia, the newspaper added.
The WHO has been pressing China to provide more information on the girl and her 9-year-old brother, who is reported to be in stable condition in hospital, also with pneumonia.
“From the information that we have we do not have details that would enable us to deny or confirm the two cases’ links to avian influenza,” said Aphaluck Bhatiasevi, WHO’s Beijing-based spokeswoman.
“We are in communication with the ministry on a regular basis, but for this case we would need more information,” she said.
Officials at the health ministry were not immediately available for comment.
China last week said the girl died of pneumonia, and stressed there had been no human infections of the deadly H5N1 strain of bird flu.
Swiss drug maker Roche Holding AG was in talks with Chinese officials about producing the antiviral drug Tamiflu on the mainland, the South China Morning Post said.
Demand has soared in recent weeks for Tamiflu, an antiviral drug approved for use as a treatment but not cure for seasonal flu, amid mounting concerns of a potential flu pandemic that could be caused by H5N1.
The spike in demand led Roche to say it would enter into discussions with other companies, primarily makers of generic or copy cat drugs, and with governments in developing countries over whether they can help produce the drug in part of as a whole.
China has reported no human bird flu infections since the latest H5N1 outbreak first surfaced in Asia in late 2003. Since then, 62 people have died in Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia and Indonesia and the virus has spread to Europe.
In the past two weeks China has revealed three outbreaks of the H5N1 virus that killed 3,800 chickens, ducks and geese.
Farmers in China, as in many parts of Asia, live alongside their poultry and other livestock, increasing the chances of the disease spreading to humans, experts say. It also raises the chance of the virus mutating into a form that could spread easily among people, triggering a pandemic. Millions could die.
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