china bird flu fatality never touched poultry

China bird flu fatality 'never touched poultry'

Beijing (dpa) - A woman who died last week from H5N1 avian influenza had no known contact with poultry and seldom ate poultry meat, Chinese state media said today.

The 41-year-old factory worker died on December 21 in the southeastern city of Sanming, Fujian province, an urban area where China has reported no outbreaks of the virus among birds or other animals.

The woman, identified only by her surname, Zhou, developed fever in early December, the China Daily newspaper quoted local officials as saying.

Zhou was already weak after an operation to remove a tumour in mid-October, the newspaper said.

But she had no contact with infected birds and no bird flu infections were found in Sanming. Zhou's relatives also said that she did not like chicken and duck meat.

"Zhou is unlikely to have been infected from poultry," the newspaper quoted Fujian disease control official Xu Longshan as saying.

Tests on December 23 were positive for the H5N1 bird flu virus but the case was not reported until December 29 "because experts could not explain how she caught the virus", it quoted an unidentified health ministry as saying.

All 66,172 poultry raised within 3 kilometres of Zhou's home had been vaccinated by December 5.

Investigators tested and culled 230 birds near Zhou's home after the infection was confirmed, but found no infections.

Tests on people who had close contact with Zhou also proved negative, the official said.

Zhou is the third person officially recorded to die from bird flu in China this year and the seventh person infected with the virus.

On Friday, World Health Organization spokesman Roy Wadia said WHO experts had no additional information about how Zhou might have contracted H5N1 bird flu.

"There are still many questions," Wadia said.

Although China's health ministry has shared virus samples from the previous human infections, the agriculture ministry has still shared no samples from infected birds with international experts, he said.

The other two Chinese people who died from bird flu both lived in the eastern province of Anhui, where outbreaks were reported among poultry.

A 12-year-old girl also died from influenza-like symptoms after handling infected birds in the central province of Hunan.

But China's health ministry said it did not list the girl as infected with bird flu because her body was cremated before experts had completed tests.

Zhou's case takes the global number of confirmed human infections with bird flu to 142, including 74 deaths, according to WHO figures.

China has reported 31 bird flu outbreaks in poultry this year.