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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)