Is China Making Its Bird Flu Outbreak Worse?
BEIJING (Time, Austin Ramzy) – One thing is certain about avian influenza: it’s deadly. Of the three people who contracted the H5N1 strain of the virus in China last year, three died. In the first six weeks of 2009, eight people have come down with bird flu and five have died. Another thing is that — while the disease has yet to go pandemic as many doctors fear it could — it remains worryingly persistent. But bird flu, it seems, is back. Last month’s five deaths — one of the highest tallies of bird-flu deaths China has ever recorded in a month — were in locations as far removed from one another as Beijing in the north, Xinjiang in the west, Guangxi in the south, Hunan in the center and Shandong in the east. “From a disease-control perspective, the increase in cases in China is notable, as is the wide geographic spread,” says Dr. Hans Troedsson, the World Health Organization’s representative in China. Equally unusual is that after such a busy month of infections in China, reports of
