Bird flu death toll reaches 5 in China
12/1/2006 8:00
Two more people have died from bird flu in China, bringing the total
fatality toll to five, the Ministry of Health reported yesterday.
The latest
victims of the H5N1 strain of the virus were a 10-year-old girl in southern
China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region and a 35-year-old man in Jiangxi
Province in east China.
The girl died on December 16 and the man on December
30.
Authorities said "Byzantine" bureaucratic procedures delayed the
announcement of the deaths.
China confirmed its first human case of avian flu
on November 16. Eight people have been infected, according to the official
count.
Two deaths were reported earlier in east China's Anhui Province, one
person died in Fujian Province in the east, and two residents of central China's
Hunan Province and Liaoning Province in the northeast recovered.
The eighth
victim, a 6-year-old Hunan boy surnamed Ouyang, fell ill in December and was in
critical condition yesterday.
Roy wadia, the World Health Organization's
spokesman in Beijing, said the two new deaths don't signify that human bird flu
infections are out of control in China.
"It's safe to say that the average
death rate among people infected with bird flu is 50 to 60 percent, the same as
in China; so it's difficult to say China's rate is high. Many factors such as
how sick the patients are when beginning to receive treatment have to be
considered," Wadia said.
"But the deaths are a reminder that it is a very
serious disease," he said.
People who were in close contact with the bird flu
patients have been put under medical surveillance, according to Ministry of
Health spokesman Mao Qun'an. No abnormal clinical symptoms or human-to-human
infections have been found among the group.
While confirming the country's
cooperation with international organizations on bird flu, Wadia said the WHO
hopes China will provide more H5N1 virus information to the international
community for scientific study and the development of anti-viral
medicines.
The chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention last month
gave the WHO samples from two of the people who died earlier from bird
flu.
And china's Ministry of Agriculture also shared five virus sequences
from an outbreak among migratory birds in Qinghai Province.
Scientists fear
that the H5N1 strain, which has killed more than 70 people since late 2003
around the world and is endemic in poultry across Asia, could mutate into a form
that spreads easily among humans, leading to a pandemic.
All 31 provinces,
municipalities and autonomous regions on the Chinese mainland have established
bird flu monitoring centers.
Xinhua
|
