Two more people have died from the H5N1 strain of bird flu in
China, bringing the death toll to five out of the eight human cases
reported to date, the Ministry of Health said in Beijing on
Wednesday.
The two victims were a 10-year-old girl in southern Guangxi
Zhuang Autonomous Region and a 35-year-old man in eastern Jiangxi
Province.
They died on December 16 and 30, respectively.
In the other cases reported since China first confirmed a case
of human infection on November 16, two died in east China's Anhui
Province, and one in eastern Fujian Province, and two - one from
central Hunan Province and the other from northeast Liaoning
Province - recovered from their infections.
The latest victim, a six-year-old boy surnamed Ouyang from
Hunan, fell ill in December and is in critical condition.
Roy Wadia, World Health Organization's spokesman in Beijing,
said the death of the two victims did not mean that human bird flu
infections were out of control in China.
"It's safe to say that the average death rate among people
infected with bird flu is 50-60 percent, so it's difficult to say
if China's rate is high. Many factors such as how sick the patients
are when they begin to receive treatment has to be considered,"
Wadia said.
"But the two people's death is a stark reminder that it is a
very serious disease," Wadia added.
According to Mao Qun'an, the Ministry of Health spokesman, the
people who were in close contact with the infected have been put
under strict medical surveillance. So far, no abnormal clinical
symptoms have been detected neither have experts discovered
human-to-human infections.
While confirming China's cooperation with international
organizations on the bird flu issue, Wadia said the WHO hoped that
China would provide more H5N1 strain virus sequence information to
the international community for scientific study and the
development of anti-retroviral medicines.
The Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)
handed over two samples from the human cases of H5N1, isolated from
the two fatalities in Anhui, to the WHO, last December.
China's Ministry of Agriculture shared five virus sequences in
2004 but last year it had only shared virus sequence information
from an outbreak of wild migratory birds in northwest Qinghai
Province.
Scientists fear that H5N1, which has killed more than 70 people
since late 2003 and is endemic in poultry across parts of Asia,
could mutate into a form that can spread easily between humans,
leading to a pandemic.
All 31 provinces, municipalities and autonomous regions in the
Chinese mainland have set up bird flu monitoring centers. And bird
flu prevention and control schemes have been improved to ensure the
early detection and containment of the disease.
(Xinhua News Agency January 12, 2006)