UN presses China for more details on bird flu scare

The World Health Organisation (WHO) pressed China yesterday to provide information on a 12-year-old girl who Chinese officials say died of pneumonia, but who was initially suspected of contracting deadly bird flu.

"After SARS they know they should really provide timely information about what is going on," WHO spokesman Fadela Chaib told a news briefing in Geneva.

China was accused in 2002 of covering up the extent of an outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) in the south of the country, contributing to its eventual spread to 8,000 people around the world, 800 of whom died.

WHO officials say the H5N1 strain of bird flu is far more lethal than Sars. While Sars had a mortality rate of around 15 per cent, H5N1, which has now spread from Asia to Europe, kills up to a third of people it infects.

Since last week China has revealed three outbreaks of the H5N1 virus that killed 3,800 chickens, ducks and geese.

But another WHO spokesman, Maria Cheng, said Chinese officials had as yet provided no information on the death of the 12-year-old girl on October 17 in southern Hunan province, the site of China's latest bird flu outbreak.

The girl's nine-year-old brother is reported to be in a stable condition in hospital, also with pneumonia.

"We need more clarification because both apparently had been exposed to sick chickens," Ms Cheng said.

Some Chinese media reports have said the girl's body was cremated and it was unclear what samples were taken, Ms Cheng said.

A Chinese Health Ministry official, Chen Xianyi, told reporters the girl and her brother had contracted pneumonia. "There have been no cases of human infection of H5N1," he said.

China has reported no human bird flu infections since the latest H5N1 outbreak first surfaced in Asia in late 2003. Since then, 62 people have died in Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia and Indonesia and the virus has spread to Europe's eastern border.

WHO yesterday issued its first public risk assessment of the consequences of bird flu spreading to Africa, warning that the virus would push "fragile health systems close to the brink of collapse".

Migratory birds, believed to play a role in the transmission of H5N1 to domestic flocks, are heading south for Africa from Siberia, where outbreaks among poultry have occurred.

In Africa, as in parts of Asia, many households keep backyard flocks, which often mingle freely with wild birds or share play areas with children, WHO said.

"With few exceptions, notably in large commercial farms, surveillance for avian disease is non-existent," it said. "In Africa, the risk of human infection from an avian H5N1 virus can be expected to be similar to that seen in Asia."

Africa had a bird flu scare earlier this week when three tourists returning from Thailand to Reunion, a French island off Africa's east coast, were suspected of having contracted the disease. Tests for H5N1, however, came back negative.

Most human bird flu infections are due to handling birds sick with the virus or contact with their droppings. Cooked meat is not a known source of infection.

Nevertheless, chicken producers across Europe have reported falling sales. France said yesterday that poultry sales had dropped by 25 per cent on average in the week to October 22 due to mounting fears over the spread of H5N1.

Italian poultry farmers have already said that a "mass psychosis" based on unjustified fears about consuming poultry products has brought their industry close to collapse.

"It's the consumers who are panicking, the farmers worry," the European Commission's Health and Consumer Protection Commissioner Markos Kyprianou told Reuters in Lithuania.

"Look at me, I eat eggs and chicken. The possibility of being infected through food is very limited, non-existent, (because) we have such high food hygiene measures in the European Union," he said.

H5N1 has been found among birds in Croatia, Romania, Turkey and Russia, but no human cases have been found so far in Europe. Russia said new bird flu outbreaks had been registered in three regions already hit by the virus - the Tambov region, 400 kilometres southeast of Moscow, in Omsk region in eastern Siberia and Kurgan in southern Urals.