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.

“Based on an extensive range of blood tests, he’s been excluded as a case of H5N1,” the virulent strain of the disease, said Dr. Julie Hall, an infectious diseases specialist for the WHO’s Beijing office.

A woman who died in eastern China’s Anhui province was the country’s first confirmed bird flu fatality.

The 36-year-old teacher fell ill after handling raw chicken, according to the government. He lived in rural Wangtan village in Hunan that suffered one of China’s first bird flu outbreaks in the recent series of cases.

He was admitted to hospital and Hall said she didn’t know whether he had been released.

Chinese experts initially said the teacher and the two siblings tested negative for H5N1. But it later reopened the investigation and asked the WHO for help. Hall was a member of the WHO team that travelled to Hunan last week to work with Chinese experts.

Hall said the children were most likely infected because they handled sick chickens – which lived on the first floor of the family’s rural home – and not because they ate infected meat, as initially reported by Chinese state media.

“They were mostly likely to have caught H5N1 from the handling and the close contact with the live animals,” Hall said. “We think that the exposure took place before they ate any poultry.”

She said the parents, along with several other people who came in contact with the household, were under medical observation, but none have shown symptoms.

The WHO announcement came after China reported three new outbreaks in poultry, bringing its total number of cases to 20 since October 19.

New epidemics of the disease have been reported almost daily despite a nationwide effort to vaccinate billions of poultry.

The latest cases occurred in the north-western cities of Urumqi and Yinchuan and in the southern province of Yunnan. Some 2,768 birds died and nearly 175,000 were destroyed in order to contain the virus.

Health experts have warned that human cases were inevitable if repeated poultry outbreaks could not be stopped.

Also today, the official Xinhua News Agency reported that China will test 100 people with a vaccine against the H5N1 strain of bird flu. There is currently no human vaccine against the disease.

The report did not say when the tests would begin or give any other details, but said the vaccine had already been tested on minks, chickens and rats.