Asia, Flu | featured news

More than 50 percent of patients infected with a new type of bird flu in China had no contact with poultry, the World Health Organization said on Friday, further raising questions about whether the virus was transmitted between humans.

China reported another death and three new infections from a new strain of avian influenza known as H7N9 on Monday, bringing the total death toll to 14 and the number of infections to 63, the official Xinhua News Agency said.

As cases of H7N9 continue to grow in China, one Chinese Air Force officer is blaming the outbreak not on genetic mutations – but on the United States government. In a post on his blog Saturday, People’s Liberation Army Sr. Col. Dai Xu accused the United States of causing the recent bird flu outbreak by releasing the H7N9 virus in China as an act of biological warfare, the Washington Free Beacon reported.

With confirmation that a sixth person has died from a mysterious avian-borne virus, Chinese officials escalated their response on Friday, advising people to avoid live poultry, dispatching virologists to chicken farms across the country and slaughtering more than 20,000 birds at a wholesale market in Shanghai where the virus, known as H7N9, was detected in a pigeon.

A middle-aged man who transported poultry for a living and another unidentified person have died from a new strain of bird flu, bringing the death toll to five among 14 confirmed cases in China, the government and state media reported Thursday. The 48-year-old man, who died in Shanghai, is one of several among the infected believed to have had direct contact with fowl. Until recently, the virus, called H7N9, was not known to infect humans.

Chinese authorities tried to calm spreading health concerns Wednesday after a third person was reported to have died from a new type of bird flu. The emergence in China of the H7N9 strain of avian flu — a total of nine cases have been reported since it was revealed last weekend — are troubling because the strain has not previously been found in humans.

The first human case of bird flu in seven years has been diagnosed in Hong Kong, health officials said Thursday, urging the public to take precautions.

China’s actions, especially quarantines of foreign visitors, brought criticism abroad, but health officials say the spread of H1N1 may have been slowed.

A health official in the region said the second wave of swine flu cases has come sooner than expected. “The level [of H1N1 cases in Japan and Korea] has already passed the threshold reached at the end of November or December or close to January,” said Takeshi Kasai, regional advisor in communicable disease surveillance and response for the World Health Organization (WHO). “It already happened in August or early September.”

Travelers to China who display flu-like symptoms may be randomly quarantined over concerns of the swine flu virus, the U.S. State Department warned.