CHINA: After a few days of putting a positive spin on its efforts to combat bird flu and foot-and-mouth disease to hit China, health authorities have admitted the latest outbreaks were far worse than previously thought, but insisted they had things under control.
International health agencies such as the World Health Organisation are worried about a possible pandemic in China, because they fear the Chinese authorities do not have the facilities to deal with a wide outbreak of disease.
The current epidemic appears to be the biggest outbreak yet of the H5N1 strain of bird flu, the kind that can kill humans.
Officials said bird flu killed over 1,000 migratory birds in the remote northwestern province of Qinghai, more than five times as many as previously reported.
However, an agriculture ministry spokesman denied rumours the disease had spread to humans.
"What we have been doing is preventing domestic fowl and people from having contact with wild migrant birds," said Jia Youling, director general of the veterinary bureau of the agriculture ministry.
The figure had earlier been given as 178. The government sealed off nature reserves and rushed over three million doses of bird flu vaccine to Qinghai.
China was also grappling with foot-and-mouth disease outbreaks in cattle in three new areas, but said they had been brought control and posed no risk to humans.
The Beijing government is haunted by memories of the global public relations disaster over its mishandling of the Sars epidemic in 2003, when health officials tried to play down the seriousness of the epidemic in China.
However, there had been no cover-up in this case, the health official said, although he could not guarantee that local governments were being fully forthcoming. He said the delay in reporting was due partly to the time it takes to get infections confirmed in a laboratory.
"The Chinese government has no intention of hiding an outbreak of foot-and-mouth. It is not a major threat to public health. So what we need to do with all our energy and resources is to put the disease under timely control, rather than in timely disclosure to the media," said Mr Jia.
Since late 2003, the H5N1 strain has killed 37 Vietnamese, 12 Thais and four Cambodians as it swept across large areas of Asia.
What scientists are most worried about is someone contracting both the bird flu virus and a regular human influenza.This could lead to a situation where the viruses swap genetic material and mutate into a form that is contagious, possibly triggering a global flu pandemic.
Scientists had proved the H5N1 virus killed scores of geese in Qinghai in early May and the area where the dead geese were found had been sealed off for 10 days.
The government has introduced a compulsory vaccination campaign in Qinghai and the far western regions of Xinjiang and Tibet in an effort to control the disease and prevent it from spreading to domestic fowl or to humans. Experts said there was still a chance domestic poultry could be at risk, since they often share water and feeding sources with wild birds.
Last year, China curbed an outbreak in the same region, culling about 145,000 birds. The government has also killed and incinerated more than 800 head of cattle to control foot-and-mouth in Beijing and neighbouring Hebei as well as the Xinjiang region.