Concerns Over How China Would Handle Bird Flu Outbreak

by Antoaneta Bezlova

(IPS) BEIJING -- China's preparedness to handle a possible worldwide outbreak of bird flu is becoming a top issue in its relations with the United States.

"Avian flu is the No. 1 internal development in China that is causing serious concern in Washington because of the country's history as a launching pad for other infectious diseases," says Bates Gill, a China researcher with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a leading think tank based in Washington. "There is an enormous importance attached to the way China copes with the spread of the virus."

China has not officially recorded a single human case, but it has imposed increasingly strict measures following warnings that a human case is inevitable if the country can't prevent outbreaks among its poultry.

Establishing and enforcing an early warning system for epidemics such as bird flu is one of the issues President Bush is likely to discuss with Chinese leaders during his visit to China Nov.19-21, says Bonnie Glaser, another China scholar with the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Glaser and Gill spoke to the foreign media in Beijing as Bush issued an urgent warning about the bird flu last week, unveiling a $7 billion flu-fighting plan.

China has dramatically beefed up its measures to contain the incremental spread of the disease among its large domestic poultry and called in the World Health Organization (WHO) to determine whether it had suffered its first human case of the virus.

Chinese authorities initially denied that a 12-year-old girl from Hunan province in central China who died after eating a chicken believed to be infected with the H5N1 virus had contracted the bird flu.

But on the weekend, Beijing reversed its stance. The state news agency Xinhua carried a brief statement saying that the disease "had not been ruled out" as the cause of her death, or the similar illness that had affected her younger brother and a local village teacher.

"After conducting comprehensive analysis, experts said although the three cases are diagnosed as pneumonia of unknown causes at present, the possibility of human infection of the highly pathogenic H5N1 strain of bird flu cannot be ruled out," a spokesman for the Ministry of Health was quoted by the agency.

The girl, He Yin, had died two weeks earlier after eating a chicken that had fallen ill. The village's birds were later confirmed to be suffering from the disease.

In a sign of how serious and widespread the problem might be, authorities ordered all 168 live poultry markets in Beijing shut, banned the import of poultry products from the provinces in the capital and announced a temporary halt to domesticated pigeon flying.

Officials in Beijing also went door-to-door seizing live chickens and ducks being raised in homes and encouraged residents to report any sight of chicken slaughtering. Health officials also announced a crackdown on peddlers selling birds that had died from the flu in the affected areas in the country.

The WHO has praised China for being more open about bird flu than it was about the SARS epidemic two years ago, when hundreds of people were infected and many died before the government admitted the scale of the problem.

Nevertheless, transparency remains a deep concern. Local officials fearing the negative impact of an epidemic emerging in their areas often try to suppress the news and deal with it internally rather than report it to Beijing.

China reported four outbreaks in October -- in Inner Mongolia, Anhui, Hunan and Liaoning provinces. The latest outbreak -- reported in Heishan country in the northeast Liaoning province -- just a few hours from Beijing, has raised alarms that the virus is encroaching on the capital and prompted authorities to call in the army and the military police to help isolate the affected villages.

The China Daily reported that the Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) has chalked out contingency plans to face any threat. Military hospitals were put on alert to isolate fever and respiratory-diseases outpatients and prepare for possible human infections.

China is home to 13 billion farmed poultry, almost a quarter of the world's total. Most of the country is exposed to the migratory routes of wild birds believed to be one of the sources for spreading the infection.

The central government has said it will set aside 2 billion yuan (25 million U.S. dollars) out of this year's fiscal budget for bird flu prevention and a control fund to create a national headquarters for bird flu control and prevention.

Against the backdrop of the Bush bird-flu plan, which calls for global preparedness for vaccination, quarantine and treatment, Beijing and Washington are discussing how to strengthen China's public health capacity. U.S. researchers say China's local centers for disease prevention have been weakened from years of financial neglect from the central authorities.

"A new disease agreement between Washington and Beijing is seen emerging and that is likely to emphasize capacity-building for China's public health," said Gill.

So far, the latest outbreak of bird flu has killed 62 people in Cambodia, Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam.