Chinese woman dies from bird flu – WHO
The Star, 26 Jan 2006

BEIJING (Reuters) - A Chinese woman infected with bird flu, the country's 10th human bird flu victim, has died, the World Health Organization confirmed on Wednesday. 

The 29-year-old woman surnamed Cao, who ran a shop in a farm goods market in Jinhua town in the southwestern province of Sichuan, died on Monday, Roy Wadia, a WHO spokesman in Beijing, said. 

Cao fell ill with a fever on Jan. 12 and had been receiving treatment in a hospital in the provincial capital, Chengdu. She was Sichuan's second human  case   of   bird  flu  this   month,

after the Chinese health ministry announced last week that a 35-year-old woman from the province died of the disease on Jan. 11. 

To date, seven of the 10 Chinese people officially confirmed to have contracted bird flu have died. 

China's Ministry of Health was not immediately available for comment. 

In Cao's case, and most of China's other reported human bird flu infections, there was no officially confirmed outbreak of the H5N1 strain of bird flu among poultry in the area beforehand. 

China, along with Vietnam, has suffered numerous outbreaks in poultry since October and Beijing has launched sweeping measures to stop the virus from spreading and infecting more people. 

Experts believe the H5N1 virus is contracted through close contact with sick birds, and fear that as the virus spreads it will mutate to enable it to spread easily from human to human, sparking a pandemic that could claim many millions of lives.