China denies blame for bird flu outbreak
China denies blame for bird flu outbreak
Agencies, Bangkok/Geneva
China, accused of deceiving the world over SARS, denied on Thursday a similar cover-up that allowed the bird flu scourge to sweep across Asia.
China's foreign ministry spokeswoman Zhang Qiyue said the accusation made in the British weekly New Scientist "is completely inaccurate, is without proof and moreover does not respect science".
The New Scientist report quoted experts as saying they suspected the new strain of bird flu, which could be greater threat than Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), also began in China, probably in the first half of 2003.
"A combination of official cover-up and questionable farming practices allowed it to turn into the epidemic now under way," the weekly magazine said.
Bird flu has spread to 10 countries from Japan to Pakistan and including China, forcing the destruction of millions of birds and killing at least eight people.
The outbreaks have raised fears the bird flu virus could mix with human influenza and form a new deadly disease that could pass directly from person to person.
While experts do not know how the virus has spread across the region so quickly, suspicion has fallen on migratory birds.
New Scientist said a decision by China's poultry producers to vaccinate birds after an outbreak in Hong Kong in 1997 may have been a mistake and could have contributed to the problem.
Hong Kong conducted a mass slaughter of chickens when the H5N1 bird flu killed six people. To protect their poultry Chinese producers later vaccinated them with an inactivated H5N1 virus.
"We are aware of samples taken early last year that turned out to be this strain exactly," Klaus Stohr of the World Heath Organization (WHO) said.
Although Stohr would not say where the early samples came from, New Scientist said comments from other experts suggested China was the origin.
Meanwhile, a World Health Organization spokesman said in Geneva on Thursday that the unsafe culling of poultry to fight the spread of bird flu may increase the risk of the virus mutating into a strain that can be transmitted from person to person,
The WHO has warned that while humans have so far only caught the disease through contact with infected birds or their droppings, it could claim millions of lives if it mutates into a form that can be passed among humans -- a risk that rises with the more people who fall ill.
"If (the killing of birds) is done in such a way that exposes more people, then this ... could be increasing the risk of developing a strain that you would not want to see," said Dick Thompson, the WHO spokesman.
"From what we can see ... many of these culling workers are not wearing the right personal protection equipment, we are also unsure how many of these people have been vaccinated against (normal) influenza," he told AFP.
The virus, which has swept through 10 Asian countries, has so far led to the deaths or culling of more than 20 million poultry. But it has claimed just 10 human lives in Vietnam and Thailand.
A sequence of factors must happen for the deadly H5N1 strain of bird flu to mutate into a form that can pass from human to human, Thompson explained.