China's health ministry is running tests to verify findings by eight Chinese
scientists that a man who died in late 2003 contracted the H5N1 bird flu virus,
the World Health Organisation said on Thursday.
"They are doing their own parallel studies on the virus taken from that man
... we are awaiting the outcome of the Ministry of Health's test," said WHO's
spokesman in China, Roy Wadia.
The researchers published a letter in the New England Journal of Medicine
last week that the 24-year-old man who was admitted to hospital in November 2003
for respiratory distress and pneumonia and later died, had been infected with
the H5N1.
That report drew concern as it spurred questions of whether there might have
been other human H5N1 infections in China prior to its first reported human case
near the end of 2005.
It was also one of the clearest indications yet that the virus may have been
brewing for much longer in the vast country than what has been reported.
The H5N1 virus made its first known jump to humans in Hong Kong in late 1997,
and then more or less petered out until it re-emerged in parts of Southeast Asia
in late 2003, when it killed three people in Vietnam.
Still largely a scourge for birds, it has killed 130 people around the world
since late 2003, according to the World Health Organisation. But experts fear
the virus may trigger a pandemic if it ever learns to transmit easily among
people.
The WHO has asked Beijing for more details of the tests conducted by the
eight experts on samples from the 24-year-old man and if Chinese laboratories
were running tests on samples taken from other people who might have died from
unknown causes.
"We were told they were carried out sometime over a period over the last
couple of years, so it may have been a retrospective test," Wadia said.
"We want to know when it was carried out, why, what rationale, and whether in
the retrospective testing of specimens these labs may have found other cases of
H5N1 in samples taken from patients who may have died of unknown causes."
The 24-year-old man exhibited clinical symptoms of SARS when he was admitted
to hospital but tested negative for that.
His virus samples genetically resembled H5N1 viruses taken from Chinese
chickens in various provinces in 2004, the eight experts said.
