Blood tests on a schoolteacher who fell ill in an area of China that suffered a bird flu outbreak show he doesn’t have the virulent H5N1 strain of the virus, a World Health Organisation official said today.

China has called bird flu a “serious epidemic” and reported three new outbreaks of the deadly virus in different parts of the country, while Canada announced multiple new cases but stressed they are not the virulent strain that has swept across Asia.

China’s Ministry of Agriculture today announced three new outbreaks of bird flu, two in the west and one in the south, resulting in the killing of nearly 175,000 birds, the official Xinhua News Agency reported.