Bird flu deaths in Anhui are first this winter
Print Edition
TWO people in Anhui Province have died from H7N9 bird flu, the first fatalities in China among this winter’s cases, while Macau reported its first human infection of the strain since returning to the motherland in 1999.
The east China province has reported five cases of H7N9 avian flu since December 8, including the two people who died, the health authority said in a statement posted on its website and dated Wednesday. It did not say whether the other three had recovered.
The Anhui cases bring the total number of people infected with the H7N9 virus in Chinese mainland this month to at least seven.
The health ministry said it was taking the reports of the cases seriously. “Currently experts’ judgment is that it is a small number of individuals, but if we discover that it’s on a large scale, it would be a different (response),” Mao Qun’an, a spokesman for the ministry, told reporters in Beijing.
He did not comment on specific measures in response to the outbreak.
H7N9 had not been detected in either humans or animals in China until March. The strain does not seem to transmit easily from person to person, and sustained human-to-human infection has not been reported, according to the World Health Organization.
The danger with any such virus is it mutates and acquires genetic changes that might raise its pandemic potential.
The last major bird flu outbreak on the Chinese mainland — from late 2013 to early 2014 — killed 36 people and led to more than US$6 billion in losses for the agricultural sector.
In Anhui, which has a population of almost 60 million, authorities shut some livestock markets and stepped up sterilization to prevent the virus spreading, a health spokesman said, adding “a few” chickens had been culled.
Authorities in Shanghai said on Wednesday a man diagnosed with the H7N9 strain was being treated there, after travelling from the neighboring province of Jiangsu.
The government in Jiangsu was looking into the origin of the infection, the provincial health authority said.
In Xiamen City in Fujian Province, in the southeast, authorities ordered a halt to poultry sales from Thursday in the Siming district, after a 44-year-old man was diagnosed with H7N9 flu, Xinhua reported on Wednesday.
The patient was in hospital and was stable, Xinhua said then. The city has a population of about 3.5 million.
Hong Kong this week reported its first human bird flu infection for this season.
In Macau, health authorities would soon discharge a patient who contracted H7N9, following a quarantine period of 10 days, said an Macau Heath Bureau Services official.The patient, a man, had been in close contact with infected poultry. He will be discharged either today or tomorrow.
Bird flu is most likely to strike in winter and spring.
In the past two months, more than 110,000 birds have been killed following bird flu outbreaks, according to the Ministry of Agriculture.
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