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Five New Bird Flu
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Chin a China found new cases of bird flu in five live bird markets in the eastern part of the country, a report posted on the website of the World Animal Health Organization (OIE) showed on Wednesday.
China said the H7N9 avian influenza virus was found on Wednesday in three live bird markets in Jiangsu province, one in Anhui province and one in Zhejiang province, the report said. It did not specify in what kind of birds the virus was found.
The three previous outbreaks reported last week were all in China"s financial hub Shanghai.
Nine people have died out of 33 confirmed human cases of the virus, according to data from the National Health and Family Planning Commission on Wednesday.
The latest H7N9 victim was from Anhui province, the official Xinhua news agency said. Among the new cases are several from Shanghai, Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces, at least one of whom is dangerously ill, it said.
Reports submitted by China"s farm ministry to the OIE last week showed that the first case of H7N9 in birds was found on April 4 on a pigeon destined for human consumption in a wholesale market in Shanghai.
Authorities also discovered seven infected chickens in the same market, which lead to the culling of 20,536 poultry in total.
The next day, one infected chicken was found at the Jingchuan market in Shanghai, and two chickens and two pigeons were discovered at the Fengzhuang market, also in Shanghai, reports showed.
Member countries of the OIE have the obligation to declare bird flu cases when found in domestic animals, or when they are highly pathogenic, which is not the case in this instance.
For details of the new outbreaks visit OIE online.
Beijing has reported its first confirmed case of the latest strain of bird flu, which until now has only been reported in eastern China.
Health authorities say a 7-year-old girl has been confirmed to have the H7N9 virus
and is being treated in a Beijing hospital.
Eleven people have died in eastern China since the virus was reported in humans for the first time last month. The virus is believed to have been transmitted from birds to humans, triggering massive culls at poultry farms and restrictions on poultry trade.
Experts worry that this new strain of bird flu could become easily transmissible and trigger a pandemic, although the World Health Organization says so far there is no evidence of the virus spreading from human to human.
HONG KONG — Since the first H7N9 fatality was identified in Shanghai in early March, the latest variant of the avian flu virus has spread across three Chinese provinces - 700 kilometers apart. Some 24 people are now infected and seven have died.
China is stepping up surveillance measures after authorities closed Shanghai poultry markets last week and culled stocks after the virus was detected in local pigeons. In Taiwan, supplies of anti-viral medicines are being made available for subsidized public sale.
There are still questions about how susceptible H7N9 is to antiviral drugs like Tamiflu. Shanghai Municipal Center for Disease Control reported Monday that a 4-year-old boy has made a full recovery, offering hope H7N9 can be treated successfully.
Professor Malik Peiris is scientific director of the Pasteur Research Center at Hong Kong University. He is also the first scientist to isolate the SARS virus that killed more than 700 people in 2002 and 2003. He cautions against reading too much into the mortality rate of the flu virus.
“I think you have to be cautious about interpreting mortality rates because, usually, only the most severe cases are investigated. There could be milder cases that go unrecognized. So, on the one hand, this would make the mortality and the severity less. But of course, on the other hand, it would mean there is more transmission occurring in humans too,” Peiris said.
Inspecting a poultry wholesale market Monday, Hong Kong health secretary Ko Wing-man said that by the end of this week live poultry imports will only be sold after 30 in every 1 ,000 birds are tested for H7N9. Tests will be expedited and results returned within four hours.
But while governments are implementing response plans across Asia, Peiris
warns that to develop vaccines and break the infection cycle, it is imperative the source of the outbreak be identified.
“Learning from H5N1 , it is quite an unpredictable virus in that there are hundreds of people working closely with poultry who do not seem to get infected," he said. "But there is the one person who may have quite a tenuous contact who [does] … So, I think what is crucial is to go upstream, along the poultry marketing chain, ideally to the farms, and identify which species is the main source.”
Hong Kong is still commemorating the 1 0th anniversary of SARS, which infected thousands as it spread from China across three continents. Many here are fearful the Chinese government coverup that contributed to the spread of SARS could be repeated with H7N9.
Thomas Abraham, director of the public health media program at Hong Kong University and author of "21 st Century Plague; the Story of SARS," believes this is unlikely. Beijing has learned valuable lessons since SARS, and social media challenge governments’ ability to control information.
“One of the early [H7N9] cases in Shanghai, even though the hospital said nothing, the patient’s admission slip was photographed and put up on Weibo (China’s Twitter)," he said. "This kind of information flow is a dam that is unstoppable. It is an entirely new environment the Chinese authorities are working in.”
Although World Health Organization officials have said there is no need for panic, Laurie Garrett, senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations, warns there could be trying times ahead if the H7N9 death toll continues to rise.
“What 2009 taught us with the swine flu [pandemic] is that global solidarity can break down very fast. Countries start closing airports and quarantining travelers; they start hoarding drugs and vaccines. It is not a pretty pictur,” Garrett said.
Though public sentiment remains fragile, some reassurance was offered by Hong Kong University last week. Researchers there announced they will revisit a 2009 study in order to confirm that surgical masks, seen widely on the streets of Hong Kong in peak influenza season, are indeed 70 percent effective in preventing the spread of flu viruses.
BEIJING — Another person died in China from a new strain of bird flu on Tuesday, state media said, bringing to eight the number of deaths from the H7N9 virus since it was confirmed in humans for the first time last month.
The 83-year-old victim, from the eastern province of Jiangsu, was admitted to
hospital with a fever on March 20 and confirmed as having H7N9 on April 2, the official Xinhua news agency reported.
The H7N9 strain has infected 24 people, all of them in eastern China, eight have died.
The World Health Organization has praised China for mobilizing resources nationwide to combat the strain by culling thousands of birds and monitoring hundreds of people close to those infected.
Authorities have said there is no evidence of the H7N9 strain being transmitted between humans.
The bird flu outbreak has caused global concern and some Chinese internet users and newspapers have questioned why it took so long for the government to announce the new cases, especially as two of the victims fell ill in February.
Airline shares have fallen in Europe and in Hong Kong over fears that the virus could be lead to an epidemic like Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), which emerged in China in 2002 and killed about 1 0 percent of the 8,000 people it infected worldwide.
Chinese authorities initially tried to cover up the SARS outbreak.
In the case of the H7N9 strain, authorities have said they needed time to identify the virus, with cases spread between eastern Zhejiang, Jiangsu, and Anhui provinces as well as the business hub Shanghai.
Other strains of bird flu, such as H5N1 , have been circulating for many years and can be transmitted from bird to bird, and bird to human, but not generally from human to human.
LONDON — Genetic sequence data on a deadly strain of bird flu previously unknown in people show the virus has already acquired some mutations that might make it more likely to cause a human pandemic, scientists say.
But there is no evidence so far that the H7N9 flu - now known to have infected nine people in China, killing three - is spreading from person to person, and there is still a chance it might peter out and never fully mutate into a human form of flu.
Just days after authorities in China announced they had identified cases of H7N9, flu experts in laboratories across the world are picking through the DNA sequence
data of samples isolated from the patients to assess its pandemic potential.
One of the world"s top flu experts, Ab Osterhaus, who is based at the Erasmus Medical Centre in The Netherlands, said the sequences show some genetic mutations that should put authorities on alert and entail increased surveillance in animals and humans.
"The virus has to a certain extent already adapted to mammalian species and to humans, so from that point of view it"s worrisome," he told Reuters in a telephone interview. "Really we should keep a very close eye on this."
New cases
China"s National Health and Family Planning Commission confirmed on Sunday that three people had been infected with the new H7N9 flu, with two deaths of men in Shanghai aged 87 and 27 who fell sick in late February. Chinese authorities have in the past two days confirmed another six cases, including another fatal one.
The World Health Organization [WHO] says the cases of H7N9 are "of concern" because they are the first in humans.
"That makes it a unique event, which the World Health Organization is taking seriously,"" the Geneva-based United Nations health agency said on Wednesday.
Other strains of bird flu, such as H5N1 , have been circulating for many years and can be transmitted from bird to bird, and bird to human, but not from human to human.
So far, this lack of human-to-human transmissi...