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China is trying to contain the widely spreading bird flu crisis (AFP)
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BEIJING,
February 3 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) - Bird flu crisis
deepened Tuesday, February 3, leading the World Health Organization
(WHO) to urge governments to watch out for any changes in the deadly
virus sweeping through Asia.
China's
own bird flu crisis, meanwhile, was aggravated Tuesday as an outbreak
was confirmed in the south of the country and suspected cases were
reported in two new provinces.
Seven
new suspected outbreaks brought the total number of cases in China to
21 - including four confirmed - affecting 12 provinces and
municipalities, according to Agence France-Presse (AFP).
“The
Ministry of Agriculture Tuesday received the report from the National
Bird Flu Reference Laboratory confirming a suspected case in Chao'an
county, Guangdong province as deadly H5N1 bird flu," the China
Central Television station (CCTV) said.
The
outbreak moved the WHO, which has repeatedly urged China to act
swiftly to avoid a re-run of last year's SARS crisis, to declare it
had been waiting for vital information for the past fortnight.
The
WHO has requested - and not yet received - details on China's
surveillance system and vaccination efforts.
It
also wants information on two Hong Kong tourists who died after
visiting the mainland last year, amid reports that the bird flu which
has hit 10 Asian nations and killed 13 people may have originated in
China in the first half of 2003.
"Maybe
it will come in the course of the week," WHO spokesman Roy Wadia
said of the missing data, reported AFP.
China
last month insisted there were no cases of bird flu in the country and
only reported its first outbreak of bird flu last Tuesday.
But
since then, the number of outbreaks have multiplied with more than one
third of China's 31 provincial-level regions affected in a one-week
period.
Officials
just last week said the situation was under control, but Premier Wen
Jiabao was quoted in state media saying Tuesday bird flu prevention
"is a tough job" for China given its vast size and backward
conditions in poultry farms in most rural areas.
"The
conditions for bird-raising in most rural areas of China are still
backward, which makes the prevention work especially difficult,"
Xinhua quoted Wen saying during a tour of two affected regions in
Hubei and Anhui provinces.
However,
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Zhang Qiyue Tuesday defended
China's handling of the outbreak.
"As
for deadly bird flu, it takes a process to discover it in China and in
the Asia region," Zhang said at a regular briefing.
"Since
bird flu broke out in parts of China, the Chinese government,
departments and relevant areas attached great importance to
this," Zhang said.
She
denied that any people had been infected.
The
northern provinces of Gansu and Shaanxi became the latest hit by
suspected outbreaks, CCTV and the official Xinhua news agency cited
the agriculture ministry as saying.
Officials
in the affected areas have began slaughtering and vaccinating poultry,
the state media said.
Meanwhile,
black swans have died in suspicious circumstances in a zoo in Shenzhen
city, Guangdong, the reports said. Specialists have arrived to
investigate.
Governments
Urged To Watch Out
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“The conditions for bird-raising in most rural areas of China are still backward,” Wen
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In
Geneva, the WHO played down the imminence of a pandemic strain that
could affect millions of people but called upon governments to watch
out for any changes in the virus sweeping through Asia.
Thirteen
people have died after coming into contact with infected poultry and
health experts have warned of the growing risk that bird flu might
gain the capacity to be transmitted between humans. They also fear
that it could merge with the human influenza virus to create a
deadlier form of flu.
"What
we really need to be able to do in this particular case is rapidly
detect any changes in the make-up of the virus and that's going to
require very intensive surveillance at country level," said
Michael Ryan, a senior WHO official in charge of the global response
to the outbreak.
"We're
saying we're not dealing with an imminent threat to public health, we
are dealing with a potential and we must be ready in terms of our
response," Ryan told reporters.
Apart
from control measures underway, Ryan - who also coordinated the global
response to the SARS crisis in Asia last year - urged countries to
ensure swift testing of samples taken from people who were thought to
have caught bird flu.
But
he urged people to stay calm, pointing out it could take months or
even longer for the H5N1 strain of bird flu to mutate even if the
virus took on human genes.
"I
think it's very important at this stage that we remain calm about
worst case scenarios," Ryan told journalists.
The
WHO said on Monday that seasonal northern hemisphere human influenza
virus may have reached Vietnam, increasing the danger that it could
combine with bird flu.
Asked
about the risk of millions of people dying from a mutation of bird
flu, Ryan responded: "We have an avian strain of influenza with
the potential to pick up human genes and we're nowhere close to
declaring a pandemic."
More
than 25 million birds have been slaughtered in an attempt to stop the
spread of the avian virus through 10 countries in Asia.
The
human toll from the disease rose to 13 with the death of a
seven-year-old boy in Thailand Tuesday and China reported suspected
outbreaks in two more provinces.
Bird
flu is known to be transmitted to humans through contact with infected
poultry and birds but cases of transmission from one person to another
are still rare, according to the WHO.
The
process of a virus acquiring human genes and mutating can take several
months or years to develop and even once that happens a pandemic
strain might be countered by effective treatment, Ryan explained.
"We
are dealing with a scenario that goes into months and beyond for the
development of any kind of transmission even if the virus were to
acquire human genes," Ryan emphasized.
"Giving
a worst case scenario without taking into account our possibility to
intervene successfully, I think, at this point, would be scare
mongering and I think it would be unhelpful," he added.
Vaccine
development is underway while several drugs used to treat flu have
been proven to be effective in treating H5N1 in humans.
An
investigation is still underway into the deaths of two Vietnamese
sisters on January 23 who could have contracted the H5N1 strain of
bird flu from their dead brother.
But
the WHO played down the impact of the cluster in Vietnam.
"We
don't know if they were human to human. These cases stopped, it was a
dead end. They did not pass the virus on to other people," WHO
spokesman Dick Thompson said.
Ryan
described cooperation with countries tackling the bird flu outbreak as
"excellent”.
Two
More Cases Confirmed In Vietnam
In
the latest development Tuesday, two more people in Vietnam have
contracted bird flu, the WHO said Tuesday, taking the number of people
infected with the disease in the country to 13, nine of whom have
died.
A
19-year-old man from the northern province of Bac Giang province and a
20-year-old woman from neighboring Bac Ninh province were hospitalized
at Hanoi's Bach Mai Hospital.
The
woman is still being treated there, but the man has recovered and been
discharged, the UN health agency said in a statement.
