China Reports 20th Outbreak Of Avian Flu in Recent Weeks

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China Reports 20th Outbreak
Of Avian Flu in Recent Weeks

Associated Press
November 23, 2005

China reported three new bird-flu outbreaks, bringing its total in recent weeks to 20. Officials called bird flu a "serious epidemic" and pledged to step up measures to contain the deadly virus.

The outbreaks were detected last week in western and southern China, resulting in the killing of nearly 175,000 birds, the official Xinhua News Agency said. Earlier, Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao said that China is stepping up measures to fight a "serious epidemic" of bird flu but has no plan to shut its borders to contain the disease.

The massive nation -- where billions of poultry are being vaccinated -- has reported one human fatality and one suspected death.

"The government is making all efforts to combat bird flu, which is a serious epidemic in China," Liu Jianchao, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman, told reporters at a routine briefing. He added that China was still "facing serious challenges" in the battle against bird flu.

CDC Pushes for New Rules

Meanwhile, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has proposed new quarantine regulations to better protect Americans from infectious diseases such as bird flu.

The proposed changes include: easier CDC access to airline and ship passenger lists, a clearer appeals process for people subjected to quarantines, and explicit authority to offer vaccinations and medical treatment to quarantined people. The changes are part of a multipronged attempt to guard against infectious agents from abroad. In the past 18 months, the CDC also has increased the number of quarantine stations at airports, ship ports and land-border crossings from eight to 18.

CDC officials say federal quarantine and contact-tracing regulations are antiquated. This is the first substantial overhaul of such regulations in at least 25 years, they said. The need for new regulations was made clear during international outbreaks of the SARS virus in 2003, when public health officials had difficulty getting passenger information from airlines to trace the contacts of people who had been infected.

"SARS put it really front and center where the gaps were," said Martin Cetron, director of the CDC's division of global migration and quarantine.

One proposal would require airlines and cruise lines to maintain passenger and crew lists and submit them electronically to CDC upon request. The measure could cause annual costs of as much as $108 million for airlines and $800,000 for cruise lines, according to one government estimate. However, that assumes a dramatic revamping of electronic record-keeping, which may not be necessary, Cetron said.

Another proposal would set forth the legal rights of a person placed under quarantine. Some legal scholars said such guidelines have been missing from federal law, and their absence could lead to a legal tangle that might stall government quarantine actions during an outbreak.

"It could mean uncertainty and delay while federal powers were litigated during an emergency," said Lawrence Gostin, a public health law expert at Georgetown University.

The rules were being published in the Federal Register, and will be open for public comment for 60 days. CDC officials say they hope to make the regulations final by next spring.

Japan Bans British Columbia Poultry

Japan joined Hong Kong, Taiwan and the U.S. in temporarily halting poultry imports from the Canadian province of British Columbia, where officials said they found a duck infected with bird flu.

Canada has insisted the bird caught a North American strain of the disease that was less virulent than the virus that has decimated poultry stocks in Asia and killed at least 67 people since 2003. Still, officials have started to kill the 56,000 birds on the farm where the duck was found.

An outbreak of bird flu in 2004 in British Columbia prompted the killing of 17 million birds.

Also Tuesday, Japan reported signs of a bird-flu infection at a poultry farm in northern Japan. It was the latest in a series of outbreaks that has led to the killing of about 1.6 million chickens in the past few months in the region.

Tests were being conducted on the enclosed-range chickens at the affected farm in Ogawa, about 60 miles northeast of Tokyo, to determine whether 290,000 more birds would need to be killed, said Ibaraki state official Osamu Kamogawa.

The chickens tested positive for H5 antibodies -- meaning they were once exposed to the virus -- and a more detailed test is being conducted to see if the disease is still present, Mr. Kamogawa said and whether it is the deadly H5N1 strain. Japan had a single human case of bird flu last year but the patient recovered.

Elsewhere

In Indonesia, health minister Siti Fadilah Supari said the number of human bird flu cases is likely to be far higher than reported because of poor surveillance outside the capital, Jakarta. The government planned a nationwide campaign to measure the extent of the virus in the sprawling country of more than 13,000 islands, Ms. Supari said.

All but two of Indonesia's 11 confirmed cases of bird flu -- seven of which have been fatal -- have occurred in the greater Jakarta area.

With China reporting outbreaks almost daily, the risk that the virus might cross the border into Hong Kong is growing, said Leung Pak-yin, chief of the Center for Health Protection.

Dr. Leung pledged to business leaders that officials would be ready for a flu pandemic.

"If anything happens in Hong Kong, we are sure that the one thing we want to ensure is we have the lowest mortality rate in Hong Kong and that we are the place that is going to recover first in the world, both from the health aspect and also from the economic aspect," Dr. Leung told members of the Hong Kong General Chamber of Commerce.

Copyright © 2005 Associated Press