As the life of a 9-year-old boy infected by the bird flu virus in central China's Hunan Province returns to normal, a senior World Health Organization official is warning that it is still too early to say that the epidemic is under control.

"Based our experience, the epidemic among poultry may temporarily diminish and then seriously return, which means we should keep alert and well prepared," said Shigeru Omi, the World Health Organization's Regional Director for the Western Pacific, in Xiangtan County, where the first human case was reported on November 16.

He said that he will not be surprised if there will be another round of serious outbreaks of avian influenza among poultry, and if there will be more human cases reported during the remaining winter months and the coming spring.

In the past three weeks, China only reported one human case and one poultry epidemic of bird flu in central China's Jiangxi Province. In Hunan, no new animal case occurred since November 28. Many places hit by the epidemic in the country have or are going to remove their restrictions.

One of the most important things in the work to control the epidemic is "we should identify or detect the human case of bird flu, which might cause a pandemic among human beings, as quickly as possible," Omi told local public health workers here during his trip to the province yesterday.

He visited the provincial centre for disease control and prevention (CDC), the hospital where the first human cases had been treated, the CDC in Xiangtan and the infected boy in his village, which is more than one-and-a-half-hour car ride away from Changsha, capital city of the province.

Although so far there has been no human-to-human transmission case found in the world, governments still have to strengthen the surveillance and reporting system of animal and human epidemics, he noted.

"The virus is very changeable and unstable, which means you do not know when it can mutate to transmit from person to person. So we have to try hard to find every first human case in a community to prevent the person from infecting others," he said.

He highly praised what Chinese health authorities have done in detecting and treating the first human case in Hunan, calling the work "wonderful and very important for other countries to learn from."

Omi met He Junyao, China's first confirmed human case, in Wangtan Village of Xiangtan yesterday afternoon, as the boy returned home from school.

His mother said that her son might have been infected with the virus through feeding the sick chicken or through watching in the sidelines as they disposed the bird.

Omi also sent his sympathies to He's parents for the death of He Yin, the boy's 12-year-old sister, who died of serious pneumonia with unknown causes on October 17. She can only be considered as a suspected case of bird flu due to a lack of evidence.

(China Daily December 23, 2005)