China on high alert - new case of pig disease in Hong Kong

After the central government said this week that it had the pig disease under control in Sichuan province, the epicentre of the outbreak, China's far south is now on high alert after one person was killed and three were infected by the disease that has killed nearly 40 in the southwest.

This suggests that dangerous meat is still being traded across the country.

According to the state media the latest victim of the disease, caused by the Streptococcus suis bacterium, had handled infected pork, and the three infected patients, all butchers, are also likely to have had contact with tainted meat.

Shenzhen is a booming special economic zone just over the border from Hong Kong, and is in the heart of a region hit by a series of health scares, from SARS and bird flu to poisoned eels.

Apparently though no cases had been found among pigs in the province, the other infections were found in three areas of surrounding Guangdong.

Henk Bekedam, a World Health Organisation representative for China, reportedly said that in order to contain the bacterium and other animal-borne diseases, China must focus more on animals.

Bekedam says if human health issues are only dealt with when they strike people, that is already one step behind in building up a defence system.

Almost all of the 200 people who have contracted the pig-borne disease became sick after slaughtering, handling or eating infected swine.

Now strict quarantine controls had been put in place to prevent infected pork from getting out.

Apparently earlier this month, China sealed off a farm in far-western Tibet and inoculated poultry within a 5 km radius after discovering an outbreak of bird flu, believed to be a strain that has killed more than 50 people across Asia and led to the deaths of some 140 million birds.

Though the pig-borne disease first surfaced in Sichuan in June, it was not mentioned in Chinese media until almost a month later, and it now seems that weeks after the initial outbreak that has killed around 650 pigs in the province, many poor farmers were apparently ignoring orders to dispose of sick and infected swine safely and were still butchering, eating and selling them.

The state media says authorities in Shenzhen, which gets around 70 percent of its frozen pork from Sichuan, has this week ordered all pork from the province to be sealed and inspected and are apparently stepping up supervision of restaurants.

Although Streptoccocus suis is endemic in most pig-rearing countries, human infections are rare.

No human-to-human infections have been found in Sichuan, but the death toll from the disease is considered unusually high.

Hong Kong Health Minister York Chow flew to Beijing for urgent talks to improve food safety on Tuesday, as the government reported that a 62-year-old woman had contracted the pig-borne disease.

This is the sixth case in Hong Kong since the outbreak began in June on the mainland.