Chinese teacher confirmed not to have bird flu

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.

The teacher lived in the same county in the central province of Hunan as a nine-year-old boy who was one of China’s first human cases. The boy’s 12-year-old sister, who died, was a suspected case.