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BEIJING: A woman in Beijing has died of suspected bird flu after
handling parts of a dead duck, Chinese state media said Tuesday.
If confirmed, the death would be the first
reported death from the disease in the country for nearly a year.
The woman, named as Huang Yanqing, died in the
Chinese capital on Monday after buying nine ducks at a market in
Beijing’s neighboring Hebei province. According to the Beijing
Health Bureau, Huang had cleaned the ducks’ internal organs.
The bureau said 116 people had been in close
contact with Huang. One nurse who had been in contact with her had
contracted a fever but recovered.
In Vietnam, health officials said Tuesday that a
Vietnamese girl has tested positive for bird flu.
The 8-year-old girl from northern Thanh Hoa
province fell ill with serious pneumonia on December 27 after eating
poultry and was admitted to a provincial hospital on January 2, said
health officials.
“The test result was available on January
3,” Nguyen Huy Nga, director of the national Preventative Medicine
Department, told Agence France-Presse. “She tested positive for
the H5N1 virus.”
The girl was now feeling better and was expected
to be discharged soon, said Nguyen Ngoc Thanh, acting director of
the Thanh Hoa health department.
The H5N1 strain of bird flu has killed 247
people since it re-emerged in Asia in 2003, according to the World
Health Organization’s latest tally on its website.
Not including the suspected death in Beijing
this week, 20 people in China have died of the disease over that
time, while another 10 contracted it but survived.
Three of those Chinese deaths were at the start
of last year.
Direct contact with infected poultry, or
surfaces and objects contaminated by their feces, is considered the
main route of human infection, the WHO said on its website.
China is regarded as a potential bird flu
flashpoint because it has the world’s largest number of poultry,
with tens of millions of chickens reared in densely populated areas.
Scientists fear the virus could eventually
mutate into a form that is much more easily transmissible between
humans, triggering a global pandemic.
The Beijing Health Bureau and the central
government’s Ministry of Health had no immediate comment on the
latest suspected death when contacted by Agence France-Presse on
Tuesday.
-- Xinhua and AFP
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