Bird flu in China

China culls birds as bird flu death toll mounts

Chinese authorities were slaughtering birds at a poultry market in the financial hub Shanghai as the death toll from a new strain of bird flu mounted to six on Friday, spreading concern overseas and sparking a sell-off on Hong Kong's share market.

Reuters

5 April, 2013

State news agency Xinhua said the Huhuai market for live birds in Shanghai had been shut down and birds were being culled after authorities detected the H7N9 virus from samples of pigeons in the market.

All of the 14 reported infections from the H7N9 bird flu strain have been in eastern China and at least four of the dead are in Shanghai, a city of 23 million people and the showpiece of China's vibrant economy.

Xinhua did not say how many birds would be culled.

In Hong Kong, shares tumbled to a four-month low on Friday on worries that the new strain of bird flu could hurt the local economy.

"The bird flu issue is at the top of people's minds now," said Alfred Chan, chief dealer at Cheer Pearl Investment in Hong Kong.

Chinese airlines were among the biggest percentage losers on the day, including China Southern Airlines, China Eastern Airlines and Air China. Cathay Pacific also fell.

The strain does not appear to be transmitted from human to human but Hong Kong airport authorities said they were taking precautions. Vietnam banned imports of Chinese poultry.

In Japan, airports have put up posters at entry points warning all passengers from China to seek medical attention if they have flu-like symptoms.

In the United States, the White House said it was monitoring the situation and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said it had started work on a vaccine if it was needed. It would take five to six months to begin commercial production.

With the fear that a SARS-like epidemic could re-emerge, China said it was pulling out the stops to combat the virus.

"(China) will strengthen its leadership in combating the virus ... and coordinate and deploy the entire nation's health system to combat the virus," the Health Ministry said in a statement on its website (www.moh.gov.cn).

SHADOW OF SARS

In 2003, authorities initially tried to cover up an epidemic of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), which emerged in China and killed about 10 percent of the 8,000 people it infected worldwide.

China "will continue to openly and transparently maintain communication and information channels with the World Health Organization and relevant countries and regions, and strengthen monitoring and preventative measures", the ministry said.

Shanghai has suspended poultry sales at two other markets and ordered through disinfection of the premises. In Huhuai, authorities were conducting proper disposal of the culled birds, their excrement and contaminated food as well as disinfection of the market, Xinhua said.

The virus has been shared with World Health Organization (WHO) collaborating centers in Atlanta, Beijing, London, Melbourne and Tokyo, and these groups are analyzing samples to identify the best candidate to be used for the manufacture of vaccine - if it becomes necessary.

Any decision to mass-produce vaccines against H7N9 flu will not be taken lightly, since it will mean sacrificing production of seasonal shots.

That could mean shortages of vaccine against the normal seasonal flu which, while not serious for most people, still costs thousands of lives.

Sanofi Pasteur, the world's largest flu vaccine manufacturer, said it was in continuous contact with the WHO through the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers and Associations (IFPMA), but it was too soon to know the significance of the Chinese cases.

Other leading flu vaccine makers include GlaxoSmithKline and Novartis

Preliminary test results suggest the new flu strain responds to treatment with Roche's drug Tamiflu and GSK's Relenza, according to the WHO.

Other strains of bird flu, such as H5N1, have been circulating for many years and can be transmitted from bird to bird, and bird to human, but not generally from human to human.

So far, this lack of human-to-human transmission also appears to be a feature of the H7N9 strain.

"The gene sequences confirm that this is an avian virus, and that it is a low pathogenic form (meaning it is likely to cause mild disease in birds)," said Wendy Barclay, a flu virologist at Britain's Imperial College London.

"But what the sequences also reveal is that there are some mammalian adapting mutations in some of the genes."

Bird-Flu Cover-Up? Chinese Social Media Out Possible Cases of Deadly Disease

Time,

4 April, 2013

A foreign journalist covering China has little choice but to get familiar with the basic habits of respiratory viruses. The country’s southern swath has been the historic incubator of many of the world’s new strains of influenza, a product presumably of humans and their food (pigs, chickens and various other creatures) living cheek by jowl by claw.

Now, just as the weather warms in the northern hemisphere, easing annual worries of an influenza pandemic, a new strain of avian influenza called H7N9 has begun to claim lives in China. As of April 2, seven people from Shanghai and the eastern provinces of Jiangsu and Anhui had been confirmed to have the disease. Two died in early March and five are currently in critical condition, according to the Chinese state press.

The fact that a deadly strain of influenza has hatched in China isn’t surprising. But what is new this time is the level of scrutiny the Chinese themselves are giving to the H7N9 virus. China’s state-controlled press is limited by daily guidelines on what it can and cannot print. Yet Weibo, a local social-media service that has become phenomenally popular over the past couple of years since Twitter is banned, has allowed the Chinese public to express itself in unprecedented ways. Weibo is still censored but it’s impossible for government minders to filter all that clutters its information thoroughfares.

In recent weeks, the Weibo community, which is estimated at some 500 million strong, was seized by the surreal news that around 16,000 carcasses of diseased pigs had floated down a river that provides much of Shanghai’s water supply. The municipal government’s reaction to the river of dead pigs was laughable; the city’s water quality, officials maintained, was still within acceptable standards. Weibo users howled.

When the cases of H7N9 were announced in the official press on April 1, Weibo speculation mounted as to whether there might be a link between floating pigs, avian flu and sick humans in eastern China. By April 2, the Shanghai municipal government was forced to hold a press conference to refute any link between the pigs and the H7N9 virus, noting that 34 porcine carcasses had been tested for H7N9 and that all results had come back negative.

Nevertheless, online skepticism remained about the government’s handling of the new strain of influenza. The same day, on April 2, someone claiming to be a hospital worker at the Nanjing Gulou Hospital, a major city in Jiangsu province, posted on Weibo what he said was a piece of paper with a March 30 diagnosis of H7N9 in a patient. The typed sheet said the patient was a 45-year-old woman who worked as a chicken butcher.

Unsurprisingly, the Weibo post was quickly deleted by censors. But the image of the diagnosis had already been picked up and widely disseminated. A day later, on April 3, Xinhua, China’s state-run newswire ran a story announcing four new cases of H7N9 in Jiangsu province. The patients, Xinhua reported, included a female 45-year-old chicken butcher. One assumes the Weibo post helped hasten Xinhua’s article.

From 2002 to 2003, China witnessed the birth of SARS, which killed hundreds of people around the world. What was just as horrifying was the Chinese government’s slow reaction to the outbreak and its dissembling on the severity of the virus. In one instance in Beijing, critically ill patients were stuffed into ambulances and driven around while health officials came calling at hospitals. Information about such shenanigans eventually leaked out because of a whistle-blower, a brave retired doctor.

(MORE: Scientists Push to Resume Research on Virulent Man-Made Flu Virus)

Yet had SARS occurred today, there’s little doubt that most every rumor or attempt at official subterfuge would have been aired on Weibo. Online censoring certainly would have followed — or perhaps even triggered an outright halt of Chinese social-media services. But ordinary Chinese citizens now know there is an alternate source of information — one could even say truth — beyond the state-controlled press. That mind shift is monumental.

Avian flu rarely jumps from fowl to human. But a few hardy strains have managed to do just that. Of those that do migrate from bird to man, nearly all cases have involved patients who had some sort of contact with diseased birds. Referring to H7N9, the World Health Organization says “at this point in time, there has been no evidence of human-to-human transmission among contacts of or between the confirmed cases.” But if H7N9 does manage to break that barrier, it could trigger a pandemic like the 2009 H1N1 swine-origin virus that luckily turned out to be less virulent than was initially feared.

Meanwhile, on the afternoon of April 3, another purported doctor piped up on Weibo, this time supposedly from Shanghai’s venerable Tongji Hospital: “Holy god, just now one patient in our hospital died of the new bird flu.” The comment was soon deleted.