Chinese boy with bird flu critical

A SIX-YEAR-OLD Chinese boy who contracted bird flu late last month is in a critical condition.

Doctors were racing to save the life of the boy, the country’s eighth confirmed human infection, the official Xinhua News Agency said.

China confirmed yesterday the boy, surnamed Ouyang, had contracted the H5N1 virus and said he was in a stable condition at the Hunan Provincial Children’s Hospital, in central China.

But by yesterday, both the boy’s lungs were showing damage, Xinhua said quoting Zhu Yimin, president of the children’s hospital.

Ouyang became the country’s eighth human victim of bird flu after showing signs of a fever and pneumonia on December 24, Xinhua said. An investigation found that poultry raised by the boy’s family at their home in Hunan province’s Guiyang county had died before the boy fell ill.

UKRAINIAN health officials yesterday said they had confirmed another outbreak of the deadly H5N1 strain of bird flu in three poultry farms on Ukraine’s southern Crimean peninsula.

Oleg Rusetsky, head of the regional agriculture department, said health authorities had been monitoring the outbreak since the last week of December, but only on Monday did they receive confirmation the virus was the H5N1 strain, which has killed people in Turkey and elsewhere in Asia.

No human cases have yet been recorded in Ukraine.