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Veterinarians play down disease threat
"We have the technology and procedures to bring the disease under control," a Ministry of Agriculture official, who identified himself only as Wang, said yesterday. "For example, we have already developed pig vaccines, though we have not produced them for a long while." Two factories, one in Guangzhou in South China's Guangdong Province and the other in Sichuan Province, are mass-producing the vaccines, said Yao Huochun, an associate professor of the College of Veterinary Medicine at Nanjing Agricultural University. Lu Chengping, president of the graduate school of the college, said even healthy pigs commonly carry the bacteria with no threat to human health. People are only likely to contract the disease from slaughtering or handling pigs that are sick or died from the infection, he said. Lu and Yao participated in the investigation of a 1998 outbreak of the infection in Nantong, in East China's Jiangsu Province. In that outbreak patients exhibited the same symptoms as those shown by victims in Sichuan high fever, bleeding under the skin and poison-related shock, they said. According to the researchers, "a few" patients died, but they did not reveal exact figures. Aside from through the slaughtering and processing of affected pigs, no other transmission channels have been found.
More than one month has passed since the first human infection was found, and
so far no person-to-person infection has been found, said Mao Qun'an, a Ministry
of Health spokesman.
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