Word: birde
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...bird flu, it seems, is back. Last month's five deaths - one of the highest tallies of bird-flu deaths China has ever recorded in a month - were in locations as far removed from one another as Beijing in the north, Xinjiang in the west, Guangxi in the south, Hunan in the center and Shandong in the east. "From a disease-control perspective, the increase in cases in China is notable, as is the wide geographic spread," says Dr. Hans Troedsson, the World Health Organization's representative in China. There is still no evidence that the virus has mutated...
...authorities in the far-Western region of Xinjiang culled more than 13,000 chickens in the city of Hotan after 519 died in a bird-flu outbreak. But until this week, China had reported no widespread outbreaks of the virus among bird populations, prompting concerns among some public-health experts that mainland health and veterinary authorities could be missing - or even concealing - the spread of the disease through poultry and wild birds. Hong Kong, where the first human cases of H5N1 infection were found in 1997, reported finding a dozen birds with the deadly strain of the virus earlier this...
...firm presence of the virus on the mainland. Some experts worry that China could be missing the disease's deadly progression. Last week Dr. Lo Wing-Lok, an adviser to the Hong Kong government on communicable diseases, said the mainland had not been forthright about the spread of bird flu in poultry. "There's no doubt of an outbreak of bird flu in China, though the government hasn't admitted it," he told Bloomberg. Yu Kangzhen, the Ministry of Agriculture's chief veterinarian, responded in an interview with the state-run Xinhua news service that human bird-flu cases...
...mainland investigators are missing the virus, it may be because efforts to block it are inadvertently hiding it. China developed an avian-influenza vaccine for poultry in 2005 and inoculates millions of birds annually. But not everyone agrees it's a panacea. In 2005 Robert Webster, an influenza expert at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, Tenn., suggested that China may have been using substandard vaccines that stopped symptoms of bird flu in poultry but allowed the virus to continue to spread. Recently, Guangzhou-based expert Zhong Nanshan also said there is a danger that China's widespread...
...Ramping up preventive measures may increasingly be a matter of life and death. Since bird flu re-emerged in 2003, 254 people in 15 countries have died of it. Researchers fear that other crises like global warming and the global recession have crowded the virus out of the news. But the disease survives - in the limelight or out of it. "The point is, this virus has not disappeared at all," says Malik Peiris, a virologist at the University of Hong Kong. "It kind of dropped off the radar screen of media attention, but the virus itself has increased its spread...