Flu panic hits China's poultry sales
news.scotsman.com
Sun 30 Oct 2005
NICHOLAS CHRISTIAN
POULTRY sales in China's biggest cities have plummeted by 80% as anxiety over a bird flu epidemic has reached new heights in the Far East.
In Vietnam, two people who died after developing bird-flu-type symptoms were buried before their illnesses could be identified in a further sign that panic is taking hold.
Although there is no evidence that humans can catch the virus through properly cooked poultry, sales at Shanghai and Beijing's biggest poultry market have plunged, sending merchants into despair.
"My income has been cut in half since the bird flu panic started," said merchant Xu Min. Health officials say the main cause of human infections is direct contact with poultry in slaughtering and butchering, or surfaces contaminated by their droppings. In Vietnam yesterday, officials announced that the cause of the deaths of the two bird-flu suspects might never be known because no samples were taken before they were buried.
A 14-year-old girl died in central Quang Binh province on October 23 and a 26-year-old man died in the same province on Thursday, said Nguyen Duc Hanh, a doctor at the hospital where they were treated.
Hanh said both had typical bird flu symptoms, including high fever, breathing difficulties and a rapid lung infection. Mai Xuan Su, a provincial health official, said the cases were not reported to the province until after the patients had died and no samples were taken.
"It is worrisome if health care workers are not alert and taking specimens if they suspect an influenza-type illness," said Hans Troedsson, the World Health Organisation representative in Vietnam.
In Indonesia, university officials said hundreds of students were ready to begin house-to-house checks of backyard chickens for bird flu as part of a "military-like" door-to-door campaign launched by the UN Food and Agricultural Organisation.
The campaign hopes to recruit up to 1,000 volunteers to look for infected chickens in the densely populated island of Java, which is the source of most of Indonesia's human bird flu infections so far, and neighbouring Sulawesi and Sumatra islands.
Bird flu has killed four people in Indonesia so far this year, and at least 62 people across Asia since 2003.
Beijing has ruled out bird flu as the cause of the death of a girl last week in the central Hunan province, but the WHO wants to see the test results before it can confirm that China hasn't suffered its first fatality.
In France, health authorities said three French tourists suspected of contracting the disease at a bird park in Thailand tested negative.
However, anxiety continued to spread elsewhere, with Australia's health minister saying that the country of 20 million people would shut itself off from the rest of the world if a human flu pandemic breaks out. |
