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Bird flu re-emerges in China and Vietnam, one dead

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Agence France-Presse | 01/06/2009 6:21 PM

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BEIJING - Bird flu re-emerged as a threat in Asia on Tuesday after China reported the disease killed a woman in Beijing and neighbouring Vietnam said a girl had contracted the virus.

The cases are the first involving humans in the two countries in nearly a year, and mark a reappearance of the H5N1 virus as Asia moves into the cold winter months that typically favour the spread of the virus.

The case in the Chinese capital saw a 19-year-old woman, Huang Yanqing, die on Monday after she fell ill on December 24, the Beijing Health Bureau said.

Huang apparently contracted the disease after she cleaned the internal organs of some ducks she had bought in neighbouring Hebei province, China's official Xinhua news agency reported.

Direct contact with infected poultry, or surfaces and objects contaminated by their faeces, is considered the main route of human infection, according to the World Health Organisation's website.

Xinhua reported that 116 people had been in close contact with Huang and that one of them, a nurse, had contracted a fever but recovered.

Huang's death was the first in China since a woman died of the disease in the southern province of Guangdong in February last year.

In Vietnam, authorities reported an eight-year-old girl had tested positive for H5N1 in the north of the country where the virus struck poultry flocks recently during cold and wet winter weather.

The girl in Thanh Hoa province fell ill with serious pneumonia on December 27 after eating poultry and was admitted to a provincial hospital on January 2, local officials said, although they added she was recovering well.

Nguyen Huu Dinh, head of the provincial animal health department, said infected poultry had been detected in the area and that all had been killed, without specifying how many.

The virulent H5N1 strain killed five people in Vietnam in early 2008, but no new human deaths had been reported since last March.

Similarly, bird flu killed three people in China in the first two months of last year before the weather warmed and the threat apparently receded.

H5N1 bird flu has killed 247 people since it re-appeared in Asia in 2003, according to the World Health Organisation's latest tally on its website, which did not include Monday's fatality in China.

Scientists fear the virus could eventually mutate into a form that is much more easily transmissible between humans, triggering a global pandemic.

China is regarded as a potential bird flu flashpoint because it has the world's largest number of poultry, with tens of millions of chickens reared in densely populated areas.

A total of 21 people in China have now died of the disease since 2003, while another 10 contracted it but survived.

There have been no reported outbreaks of bird flu among poultry in Beijing recently but the disease did resurface in another province in the east of the country last month.

More than 370,000 chickens were culled in east China's Jiangsu province in December after the virus was detected among poultry on farms there.

In areas of northern Vietnam that border China, authorities have reported bird flu in three poultry flocks there since late December, leading to the slaughter of hundreds of ducks and thousands of chickens.

Vietnam's health ministry has issued a nationwide bird flu alert, urging cities and provinces to step up detection and epidemic control measures.

The Tet Lunar New Year festival in Vietnam this month is considered a high-risk time for the spread of bird flu because the slaughter, trade and consumption of poultry, and the smuggling of birds from China, rise sharply.