WHO wants more info on bird flu from China

Following pressure from world health bodies China on Friday to provide information on the death of a 12-year-old girl, Chinese officials now say the child died of pneumonia.

She was initially suspected of contracting deadly bird flu.

World Health Organization (WHO) spokeswoman Fadela Chaib, says that after the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) epidemic they know they must provide timely information about what is going on.

In 2002 China was accused of not disclosing the extent of an outbreak of SARS in the south of the country, which resulted in its eventual spread to 8,000 people around the world, 800 of whom died.

According to the WHO, the H5N1 strain of bird flu is far more lethal than SARS, and while SARS had a mortality rate of around 15 percent, 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 according to another WHO spokeswoman, Maria Cheng, Chinese officials as yet have not provided any 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 9-year-old brother is also reported to be in a stable condition in hospital with pneumonia.

Cheng says more clarification is needed because both apparently had been exposed to sick chickens.

Apparently some Chinese media reports have said the girl's body was cremated and it is unclear what samples were taken.

However a Chinese Health Ministry official, Chen Xianyi, says the girl and her brother had contracted pneumonia, and there have been no cases of human infection of H5N1.

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

As farmers in China, as in many parts of Asia, live alongside their poultry and other livestock, which increases the risk of the disease spreading to humans, many experts are suspicious of the Chinese assurances.

It also raises the chance of the virus mutating into a form that could spread easily among people, triggering a pandemic, and millions could die.

Last week WHO 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".

It is believed migratory birds play a active role in the transmission of H5N1 to domestic flocks, and many are now heading south for Africa from Siberia, where outbreaks among poultry have occurred.

WHO says that 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.

It seems that with the exception of large commercial farms, surveillance for avian disease is non-existent, and the risk in Africa of human infection from an avian H5N1 virus can be expected to be on a similar scale as that seen in Asia.

A bird flu scare erupted in Africa last week when three tourists returning from Thailand to Reunion, a French island off Africa's east coast, were suspected of having contracted the disease.

Fortunately tests for H5N1 proved to be negative.

In general 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.

This fact however has not stopped sales of chicken across Europe plummeting.

French poultry sales have reportedly dropped by 25 percent while 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.

The European Commission's Health and Consumer Protection Commissioner Markos Kyprianou, says farmers are concerned that consumers are panicking.

He says the possibility of being infected through food is very limited, and almost non-existent, due to the high food hygiene measures in the European Union.

H5N1 has been found among birds in Croatia, Romania, Turkey and Russia, but no human cases have been found so far in Europe.

Russian officials say new bird flu outbreaks had been registered in three regions already hit by the virus, the Tambov region, 400 kilometers southeast of Moscow, in Omsk region in eastern Siberia and Kurgan in southern Urals, but did not identify the strain of the virus.