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 Anhui has reported five cases of H7N9 avian flu since Dec. 8,
including the two people who died, the eastern province's health
authority said in a statement dated Dec. 21, posted on its website.
It did not say whether the other three people had recovered or not.
The Anhui cases bring the total number of people infected with the
H7N9 virus in mainland China this month to at least seven.
The health ministry said it was taking the reports of the cases
seriously.
"Currently experts' judgment is that it is a small number of
individuals, but if we discover that it's on a large scale, it would
be a different (response)," Mao Qunan, a spokesman for the ministry,
told reporters in Beijing.
He did not comment on specific measures in response to the outbreak.
H7N9 had not been detected in either humans or animals in China
until March 2013.
The strain does not seem to transmit easily from person to person,
and sustained human-to-human infection has not been reported,
according to the World Health Organization.
The danger with any such virus is that it mutates and acquires
genetic changes that might increase its pandemic potential.
The last major bird flu outbreak in mainland China - from late 2013
to early 2014 - killed 36 people and led to more than $6 billion in
losses for the agricultural sector.
In Anhui, which has a population of almost 60 million, authorities
shut some livestock markets and stepped up sterilization to prevent
the virus spreading, a spokesman for the provincial health
authority's emergency department said, adding "a few" chickens had
been culled.
Authorities in Shanghai, China's biggest city with more than 24
million residents, said on Wednesday a man diagnosed with the H7N9
strain was being treated there, after traveling from the neighboring
province of Jiangsu.
The government in Jiangsu was looking into the origin of the
infection, the provincial health authority said.
INFECTED POULTRY
In Xiamen, a city in Fujian province also in the east, authorities
ordered a halt to poultry sales from Thursday in the Siming
district, after a 44-year-old man was diagnosed with H7N9 flu, state
news agency Xinhua reported on Wednesday.
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The patient was in hospital and was stable, Xinhua said then. The
city has a population of about 3.5 million.
Hong Kong this week reported its first human bird flu infection for
this season.
In Macau, health authorities will soon discharge a patient who
contracted H7N9, following a quarantine period of about 10 days,
said an official at the Macau Heath Bureau Services who only gave
his surname Yang.
The patient, a man, had been in close contact with infected poultry,
Yang told Reuters. He will be discharged on either Friday or
Saturday.
Bird flu is most likely to strike in winter and spring.
Farmers have in recent years increased cleaning, animal detention
techniques and built roofs to cover hen pens to prevent infection
from wild birds, among other steps, in an effort to stop the
disease.
In the past two months, more than 110,000 birds have been killed
following bird flu outbreaks, according to the Ministry of
Agriculture. They did not lead to human infection.
The latest cases come as South Korea and Japan have ordered the
killing of tens of millions of birds in the past month, fuelling
fears of a regional spread.
(Reporting by Stella Qiu, Ryan Woo, Muyu Xu and Cate Cadell; Editing
by Robert Birsel)
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