Shanghai Daily/Xinhua

China's top veterinarian yesterday rejected as scientifically groundless a study that reported the emerging dominance of a bird flu strain in Asia.

Jia Youling, director of the Agriculture Ministry's Veterinary Bureau, also said 20 virus samples had been sent to a World Health Organization lab in the United States.

The disputed study, published in the international journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, claimed a new strain - dubbed H5N1 Fujian-like - had already spread to Malaysia, Laos and Thailand, and may cause a major outbreak in Asia and Europe.

"There is no such new Fujian-like virus variant at all," Jia said in Beijing. "It is utterly groundless to assert that the outbreak of bird flu in Southeast Asian countries was caused by AI (avian influenza) and that there would be a new wave of outbreaks in the world.

"The data used in the article are erroneous and the research methodology is unscientific. The conclusions of the paper are untenable and contravene the facts," Jia said.

Co-author of the report Guan Yi, from Hong Kong University, said he had collected more than 50,000 samples from Fujian, Guangdong and four other provinces.

But Jia said none of the veterinary authorities in those provinces had received applications from him as required by law.

Jia said Guan had also failed to indicate the location and owners of the fowl he used, which goes against internationally accepted standards.

Jia said if Guan had bought 50,000 poultry in markets for his research, then he would not have used only 76 blood serum samples to support his study, as blood serum tests were quite simple.

The only option left, he said, was that Guan collected his samples from manure gathered in fowl markets.

If this was the case, then his results could not be exact, because manure could easily be contaminated with other materials, Jia said.

In Geneva on Thursday, China's Minister of Health Gao Qiang also refuted the report.

At a press conference, Gao said its data were false and its claims "lack scientific proof."

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

Gao said there had been no avian flu outbreak in Fujian since 2004, so it would have been impossible to isolate a Fujian-like virus in the province last year, Gao said.

The minister also rejected accusations that China was not willing to share avian flu virus samples with the WHO.

Gao said that since 2004 China had provided a number of virus samples to the UN agency at its request, and the two sides actually had reached an agreement on sample sharing last year.

Top vet Jia also told reporters yesterday the WHO had apologized to the Chinese government after bird flu samples provided by China were misused by foreign research institutions.

"Mr (Henk) Bekedam from the WHO Beijing office apologized to me personally twice. His attitude was very sincere and I was deeply moved," Jia said.