(AP/China Daily)
Updated: 2005-11-17 06:20

Experts worry the virus could spread and mutate in China due to its huge poultry flocks and their contact with humans. It also has migration routes for geese and other wild birds that might carry the disease.

Villagers watch as health workers spray disinfectant in Heishan County of Northeast China's Liaoning Province yesterday. The province has reported four bird flu outbreaks since last month, including one in Heishan. [Reuters]

Officials had warned a human infection in China was inevitable after the country suffered 11 outbreaks in poultry over the past month, which prompted authorities to destroy millions of birds.

Elsewhere in Asia, the H5N1 strain has infected at least 126 people and killed at least 64 of them since 2003, two-thirds of them in Vietnam.

Nevertheless, WHO spokeswoman Maria Cheng in Geneva said the Chinese cases do not increase the risk of a flu pandemic because there has been no observed genetic change in the virus and no apparent spread between people.

She said it would not be surprising if more human bird flu cases are confirmed in China. "There are a lot of chickens infected and there's a lot of contact between humans and chickens in China," she said.

The Chinese government announced plans Tuesday to vaccinate all the country's 14 billion domestic fowl.

It wasn't clear how long that would take. According to Chinese health officials, vaccinating chickens can require repeated injections and booster shots. State television showed workers at industrial-scale poultry farms jabbing chickens with injector guns.

Health experts in Geneva said shots were the most reliable way to deliver vaccine, although it can also be administered by mixing it in the animals' feed.

Officials in Liaoning in China's northeast, scene of four outbreaks, said they have finished a vaccination program begun this month for the province's 320 million birds.

Such vaccination programs are "the right thing to do," said David Nabarro, the U.N. coordinator for bird and human flu. The virus is so entrenched in China's birds that simply slaughtering them will not work, he said. The best plan is to vaccinate and then slaughter when there are outbreaks, he said at a conference on bird flu in New York.

The Chinese territory of Hong Kong recorded the first known cases of human infection with H5N1 bird flu in 1997, when it infected 18 people and killed six, according to WHO. The entire poultry population of about 1.5 million birds was slaughtered.

In Liaoning, officials took reporters Wednesday to the village of Qitaizi in an effort to reassure the public by showing off anti-disease work.

Officials destroyed 160,000 chickens in the village after 40 were found dead of bird flu on Nov. 4.

"Obviously there's no way we can kill all the migratory birds," said Shao Chuanming of the provincial animal health bureau. "But as long as we can sever the links of transmission between migratory birds, poultry and people, then the controls are effective."

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