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Wen: China doing its best |
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BEIJING, Thurs. --- China is working hard to prevent the spread of bird flu and keep it from infecting people, the Government said, as Hong Kong newspapers reported today that a girl had died from flu-like symptoms after eating sick chickens. “The Government is taking effective measures to prevent the spread of the deadly H5N1 strain of bird flu”, the Xinhua News Agency said, citing Premier Wen Jiabao. It was the first comment by a top leader since chickens, ducks and geese in the northern region of Inner Mongolai, in Anhui province in the east and central China’s Hunan province were confirmed to have died from the disease. Wen said authorities had conducted a “massive culling of domestic poultry” and imposed strict quarantines. Local residents had also been vaccinated, he was cited as saying along the sidelines of the regional meeting in Moscow. |
“China definitely can bring the bird flu under control through the above measures”, he said. According to the Ming Pao Daily, 12-year-old He Yin developed a high fever and flu-like symptoms on Oct 13 in Wantang, a village in Hunan. She died three days later in hospital, the Hong Kong paper reported, quoting an unidentified doctor at the hospital. The official Xinhua news agency reported today that pneumonia was the cause of death of the Hunan girl. The report cited local health officials as saying initial blood tests showed the 12-year-old had tested negative for bird flu. Meanwhile, authorities in Vietnam where 41 people have died of the H5N1 strain of bird flu, said they may produce a generic version of an anti-bird flu drug if a licensing agreement cannot be reached with the drug’s Swiss manufacturer. The Government is in talks with |
Roche Holding AG, the patent holder of antiviral drug Tamiflu, for a licence, said Cao Minh Quang, director of the Health Ministry’s Pharmaceutical Management Department. “We have goodwill, we invite Roche to negotiate on the licensing of technology and raw materials”, he said. “We have to take action now, we don’t have time”. He said Vietnam would like to begin developing the drug as early as next month to allow it to build up its national stockpile to 15 million capsules, enough to treat about 30 per cent of its people. The country now has only 600,000 tablets of Tamiflu donated by Taiwan, which is enough to treat 60,000 people. Bird flu edged closer to Europe’s heartland with tests confirming the deadly H5N1 strain of the virus had reached Croatia. Preliminary tests conducted on three people who returned to the Indian Ocean French island of La Reunion after a trip to Thailand indicated yesterday |
they may have the H5N1 strain. In Brussels, the European Union said today European scientists were developing a prototype vaccine that could be used to speed up production of shots to immunize people during the next flu pandemic. The group is the latest of several around the world to announce they are working on a potential pandemic vaccine. Experts say a human flu pandemic is inevitable, but it is not possible to create a practical vaccine until the pandemic strain surfaces because the vaccine would need to use the actual flu strain for an exact match. Once it emerges, it could take six months to produce adequate amounts of vaccine, but that process can be accelerated by experimenting with vaccines using bird flu strains believed to be capable of spawning a human pandemic. --- Agencies. |
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