China Daily, the only English Language national newspaper in the country, is to publish a report about Chinese experts who have denied the emerging of a new strain of bird flu in some part of the country.

The full text of the report is as follows:

The nation's leading bird flu experts Saturday refuted a report that a new strain of bird flu had emerged in southern China, published by a foreign publication and widely cited by foreign media recently.

Scientists in Hong Kong and the United States said in a report released last week that a new strain of bird flu called the "Fujian-like virus", first isolated in the southern Chinese province of Fujian last year, had become prevalent in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, Laos, Malaysia, and Thailand.

Chen Hualan, director of the National Bird Flu Reference Laboratory at the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, rebuked the report, published in the US-based Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences saying its claims "lack scientific proof".

"The so-called 'Fujian-like virus' is not a new variant of the virus," she said, "Gene sequence analysis of the virus shows that it shares high conformity with the H5N1 virus that was isolated in Hunan when bird flu broke out in early 2004."

Samples from every domestic bird flu outbreak are sent for isolation and gene sequence analysis at Chen's lab.

Chen said that in 2005 and 2006, the lab had isolated some viruses in waterfowl in southern China which was reported to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the World Organization for Animal Health (OIE).

"These viruses all remain steady in gene type and there is no marked change in their biological characteristics," she said.

Chen said there was only one new variant of the virus, which was isolated to north China's Shanxi Province and the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region at the beginning of this year and has been reported to the FAO and OIE.

Experimental results show that the variant is weak in triggering disease in mammals and a new vaccine, which has been put into use in these areas, has effectively brought it under control.

Chen also defended the effectiveness of China's bird flu vaccine, saying that it had a good effect, in response to the report's surmise that the current vaccine was less effective for the "Fujian-like virus".

The report claimed that through the analysis of serum samples from 76 chickens for signs of antibodies against three H5N1 variants, including the Fujian-like strain, they found almost all of the samples displayed two to four times more antibodies to the other two variants than to the Fujian virus, suggesting that the vaccine given to the chickens was less effective against that strain.

Chen said that the evaluation of the vaccine was "not scientific" as where the chickens were from and whether they had been vaccinated was unknown.

Chen said that since the country launched a strategy of culling and vaccination to curb bird flu in the later half of 2005, the number of bird flu cases has plummeted.

Statistics from the Ministry of Agriculture showed that more than 95 percent of domestic poultry had been vaccinated from January to October. Ten cases of bird flu broke out in poultry populations from January to October this year, there were 50 cases in 2004 and 31 last year.

Shu Yuelong, director of the National Influenza Centre at the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, also refuted the report's allegation that five people in southern China were actually infected by the new "Fujian-like virus".

Shu said that altogether 16 variants of bird flu viruses have been found in the 20 confirmed cases of human infections in the Chinese mainland since October 2005, seven in 2005 and 13 in 2006.

"Fifteen out of the 16 variants were isolated from cases in southern China and they belong to the same gene type," Shu said, "There is no proof that five of them were infected by a new mutated virus."

Shu said that the viruses isolated in South China and northern China were very different and also differed a lot with the virus isolated in Vietnam and Thailand.

Chen Hualan also attacked the report's allegations that the "Fujian-like virus" was causing a third wave of prevalence of bird flu in Southeast Asia.

"Judging from the actual situation, these allegations are all subjective and arbitrary surmises," she said.