Chinese man dies of bird flu

A man in southern China’s Jiangsu province has died of bird flu, becoming the country’s 17th official fatality from the disease, the government said today.

The 24-year-old, whose surname was given as Lu, died in hospital yesterday and tests confirmed he was suffering from the difficult-to-treat H5N1 virus, the Jiangsu Provincial Disease Control and Prevention Centre said in a statement on its website.

Phone calls to the centre early today went unanswered.

The report said the man had no known contact with dead poultry, and there were no reported outbreaks of bird flu in the province. He developed chills, fever and other symptoms on November 24 and was admitted to hospital three days later, it said.

As a precaution, 69 people with close contacts to Mr Lu were put under medical observation, the statement said.

The World Health Organisation said the death showed that China needed to strengthen its surveillance of the disease.

“It’s an important thing because the earlier you can detect an outbreak the better,” said Hans Troedsson, WHO representative in Beijing.

He said China had shared information with the WHO and had pledged to work with it, but added that it was worrying there was a death in an area where no outbreaks of bird flu had been reported.

“If you have a human infection by H5N1, there should be infected poultry in that environment,” Mr Troedsson said.

China, which breeds more poultry than any other country in the world, has vowed an aggressive fight against H5N1, which has sickened at least 335 people worldwide, killing 206 of them, according to the WHO.

The upsurge in H5N1 bird flu outbreaks around the world has led to the slaughter of millions of birds across Asia since late 2003. It remains endemic throughout Indonesia and in parts of Bangladesh, Vietnam, Egypt, Nigeria and China.

China has reported sporadic outbreaks of the disease among poultry and 26 human cases, including the most recent.

Experts have warned that if outbreaks among poultry are not controlled, the virus may mutate into a form more easily passed between people, potentially resulting in millions of deaths.