China checking another possible case of human bird flu

According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), China is checking on a possible human case of bird flu in a northeastern province, the second part of the country to make such a precautionary diagnosis.

The Liaoning provincial government, which has already culled some 10 million birds, said last week that preliminary examinations had ruled out avian influenza in humans, though one chicken worker was suffering from pneumonia of an unknown cause.

WHO's spokesman in China Roy Wadia, says a female poultry worker who had initially been diagnosed with pneumonia has not been disregarded as a possible case of bird flu.

The WHO is about to send a team to the southern province of Hunan to investigate three other pneumonia cases which China said could not be excluded as bird flu as the three lived close to the site of a poultry outbreak.

It seems that one of the pneumonia patients was a 12-year-old girl who has died.

Wadia says that tests to confirm bird flu in the three would take at least a week.

As yet China has not reported any human cases of bird flu, which has killed more than 60 people in Asia since 2003, mainly in Vietnam and Thailand.

At present the deadly H5N1 strain has not demonstrated an ability to spread easily among people.

In an attempt to try to control the spread in China, millions of birds have been slaughtered and the country has begun a compulsory poultry vaccination scheme.

Although the state media has said early this week that some parts of Liaoning, which had reported bird flu, were now all clear of the disease, over the weekend the Hong Kong government said Beijing had confirmed an outbreak in central Hubei province.

Only last week Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao warned that the country was facing a "very serious situation" as the disease had not been brought under control and was likely to spread.