China confirms second human death from bird flu

China’s Health Ministry said yesterday that the latest fatality — a 35-year-old farmer identified only by her surname, Xu — died Tuesday after developing a fever and pneumonia-like symptoms following contact with sick and dead poultry.

The woman tested positive for the H5N1 virus, the official Xinhua News Agency said, citing the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention.

The woman lived in Xiuning County in the eastern province of Anhui, Xinhua said. It gave no further details.

China’s first confirmed bird flu death was also a woman from Anhui.

Dick Thompson, a spokesman for the World Health Organisation in Geneva, said the second confirmed death — while serious — did not change the global health body’s risk assessment in China.

"As long as the virus is circulating in animals, there will also be sporadic human cases," he said. "But human cases of bird flu are really extremely rare events."

The country’s only other confirmed human bird flu case was a 9-year-old boy in the central province of Hunan, who fell ill but recovered. His 12-year-old sister was recorded as a suspected case, and later died. However, her body was cremated before tests could confirm whether she had the virus.

A WHO official in Beijing said blood tests on a schoolteacher who fell sick in the same area showed that he didn’t have bird flu.

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

The government said the teacher, 36, became ill after handling raw chicken. He lived in rural Wangtan village in Hunan, which suffered one of China’s first bird flu outbreaks in the recent series of cases.

Hall said the children in Hunan were probably infected by handling sick chickens — which lived on the first floor of the family’s rural home — and not because they ate infected meat, as had been reported by Chinese state media.

The WHO announcement came after China reported three new bird flu outbreaks in poultry.

Such outbreaks have been reported almost daily despite a nationwide effort to vaccinate billions of poultry. The latest were in the northwestern cities of Urumqi and Yinchuan, and in the southern province of Yunnan. A total of 2,768 birds died and nearly 175,000 were destroyed to contain the virus.

Also yesterday, Xinhua said China will test 100 people with a vaccine hoped to protect against H5N1. There is currently no human vaccine.

The report gave no other details, but said the vaccine had already been tested on minks, chickens and rats.

It is "safe and effective," Yin Weidong, general manager of Sinovac Biotech, one of the developers, was quoted as saying.

Sinovac Biotech and China’s Centre for Disease Control and Prevention jointly developed the vaccine, which uses a modified version of the bird flu virus from WHO, Xinhua said.

Another woman in the northeastern province of Liaoning, where four outbreaks have been reported, is still under observation, Hall said. Her test results were expected within days.