China: Please post all China articles here

[bikerduck]

BEIJING (AFP) - Over 400 students at a university in central China's Henan province were hospitalized with high fevers linked to an unknown flu virus, state press and a school official have said.
The outbreak began on March 26 when 22 students were hospitalized with high fevers, Xinhua news agency said.

The next day the number of sick students at the Henan University of Science and Technology in Luoyang city rose to 88, and on March 28 there were 208 sick students in the university's infirmary, it said.

"There were over 400 students that became feverish with the flu," a university official who declined to be named told AFP when contacted by phone.

He refused to detail what type of flu it was or how the outbreak had succeeded in infecting so many students.
Local health officials were currently trying to identify the flu strain, Xinhua said.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20060402/hl_afp/healthchinaflu_060402123620

South China Morning Post
Tuesday, April 11, 2006

A suspected second human case of bird flu has emerged in Guangzhou but authorities have imposed a news ban on reporting the case, sources said yesterday.

A source at the Guangzhou No1 People's Hospital said a 41-year-old woman, identified as Ms Li, was admitted on March 25 with unexplained pneumonia. The source said experts confirmed two days later that Ms Li had the H5N1 virus but the case had yet to be reported by official media. The woman lived in the Xihua area of Guangzhou's Yuexiu district.

Full article:
http://www.asiamedia.ucla.edu/print.asp?parentid=42711

This is an article from last year, but it demonstrates an ongoing problem with transparency and truthfullness of anything coming out of China.

The Straits Times
Tuesday, August 2, 2005

China vowed yesterday to punish officials who falsify or delay reports on a deadly swine flu that has infected at least 198 people and killed 36, while Hong Kong's government adopted tough measures to guard against the disease.

Seventeen new infections of streptococcus suis bacteria and two new deaths were reported in China's south-western province of Sichuan, state television said yesterday.

It said the disease had struck 176 villages.

Beijing, which came under fire for covering up the Sars outbreak two years ago, insisted the pig-borne disease was under control.

The online edition of the official Xinhua news agency quoted a health official in Ziyang, where the outbreak was first reported in June, as saying the rates of new infections and deaths have fallen.

Media coverage of the outbreak has been restricted: Chinese reporters say they may no longer visit affected areas and newspapers have been told to publish Xinhua reports.

Still, the World Health Organisation (WHO) said in a statement that China has done a good job of supplying information on the epidemic and taken extensive steps to block further infections.

'In cases of negligence, attempted cover-ups, failure to report or delaying report that lead to serious consequences and great losses, the top person in charge will be held accountable,' the Beijing Evening News said, quoting a Sichuan government statement

Full article:
http://www.asiamedia.ucla.edu/article.asp?parentid=27542

Wed Apr 12, 2006 6:54 AM ET
By John Ruwitch

GUANGZHOU, China (Reuters) - The cacophony of squawking, clucking, honking and quacking that two football fields' worth of live poultry makes is the first thing you notice approaching the Baixing Free-Range Bird Wholesale Market.

Then the smell of feathers, feed, dirt and feces hits.

Tens of thousands of birds from all over southern China are trucked each day to the market in a dust-covered suburb of Guangzhou where they are stocked temporarily in small pens and sold -- live or butchered -- to retailers or restaurants.

It is a massive one-stop shop for all kinds of poultry, including chickens, ducks, geese and pigeons. It is also possibly the ideal place for avian influenza to spread.

The H5N1 strain of bird flu has spread with surprising speed. Since January, more than 30 countries have reported outbreaks.

Sitting in the middle of the market, duck vendor Li Jingwen seems oblivious to the noise and stench, and brushes off suggestions that bird flu might be something to fear.

Full article:
http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=topNews&storyid=2006-04-12T105411Z_01_HKG198548_RTRUKOC_0_US-BIRDFLU-CHINA.xml

I wonder if these dead pigs are being tested for H5N1. Pigs are the well-known intermediate host for avian flu becoming human pandemic flu.

By Maggie Fox, Reuters | April 11, 2006

WASHINGTON -- A dangerous infection that pigs can pass to people took an unusually fatal form last year and killed 38 people in China, scientists reported yesterday.

All but one of the people killed by Streptococcus suis in July and August 2005 died of streptococcal toxic shock syndrome, the Chinese scientists said. This severe type of immune reaction had never been seen in S. suis infections.

Full article:
http://www.boston.com/news/world/asia/articles/2006/04/11/rep
ort_ties_38_deaths_in_china_to_swine/

Updated: 2006-04-18 21:04

A 21-year-old man in central China's Hubei Province was confirmed to be infected with H5N1 bird flu, the Ministry of Health said on Tuesday.
The man worked as a security guard in Wuhan, the capital of Hubei province, said Aphaluck Bhatiasevi, a spokeswoman for the WHO's Beijing office.

He became sick on April 1 and was suffering from a high fever, she said. He was diagnosed with pneumonia of unknown causes, she said.

Full Article:

http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2006-04/18/content_570909.htm

[bikerduck]

Beijing scientists said in a medical journal Wednesday that a man in mainland China died of bird flu in November 2003 — two years before the communist country reported any human infections to the World Health Organization.
At the last minute, however, the scientists asked without explanation to withdraw the journal report. But it was already in print.

The man's death was initially thought to have been caused by SARS, the scientists wrote. That raises the possibility that other cases attributed to SARS may have actually been the deadly H5N1 flu.

"It's hard to believe that this is the only person in all of China who developed H5N1" that year, said Dr. John Treanor, a flu expert at the University of Rochester.

WHO was surprised by the report, which came not from the Chinese government but from eight scientists in a research letter in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Full Article:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060621/ap_on_he_me/bird_flu_china

[Deepwater]

Mystery Swine Deaths in Eastern China
Recombinomics Commentary
September 4, 2006

Since June 2006, a pig disease characterized by rising body temperature, redness of the skin, and rapid breathing has occurred in portions of Anhui, Jiangxi, Zhejiang, Hunan, Hubei, Jiangsu, and other provinces.

News obtained from the Hunan, Jiangxi, Fujian regions shows that this outbreak has caused large-scale pig herd deaths in parts of the region. In the area of Nanchang in Jiangxi alone, nearly one million pigs may have died

The above comments on a spreading fatal swine disease in China are alarming on several fronts. There has been little coverage in the press and no diagnosis for the widespread outbreak. The regions affected correspond to locations where the Fujian strain of H5N1 has been reported. H5N1 in swine has also been reported in Fujian province (see below).

Swine can host swine, avian, and human influenza. Swine are mixing vessels for influenza reassortment and recombination. In Canada, the level of reassortment and recombination in swine has increased in recent years.

http://www.recombinomics.com/News/09040601/Mystery_Swine_China.html

[David_Lohr]

Bird flu: China inoculates over 46 mn fowls

Beijing, Oct 23. (PTI): A total of 42.6 million domestic fowls in north China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region have received mandatory inoculations following an outbreak of bird flu in the region last month, a report said on Sunday.

Full Story:
http://www.hindu.com/thehindu/holnu...00610230313.htm