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Optimism increases in epidemic battle
(China Daily)
Updated: 2005-12-23 06:29
Threat of outbreak still looms
As the life of a 9-year-old boy infected by the bird flu virus in Central
China's Hunan Province returns to normal, a senior World Health Organization
official is warning that it is still too early to say that the epidemic is under
control.
"Based our experience, the epidemic among poultry may temporarily diminish
and then seriously return, which means we should keep alert and well prepared,"
said Shigeru Omi, the World Health Organization's Regional Director for the
Western Pacific, in Xiangtan County, where the first human case was reported on
November 16.
He said that he will not be surprised if there will be another round of
serious outbreaks of avian influenza among poultry, and if there will be more
human cases reported during the remaining winter months and the coming spring.
In the past three weeks, China only reported one human case and one poultry
epidemic of bird flu in Central China's Jiangxi Province. In Hunan, no new
animal case occurred since November 28. Many places hit by the epidemic in the
country have or are going to remove their restrictions.
One of the most important things in the work to control the epidemic is "we
should identify or detect the human case of bird flu, which might cause a
pandemic among human beings, as quickly as possible," Omi told local public
health workers here during his trip to the province yesterday.
He visited the provincial centre for disease control and prevention (CDC),
the hospital where the first human cases had been treated, the CDC in Xiangtan
and the infected boy in his village, which is more than one-and-a-half-hour car
ride away from Changsha, capital city of the province.
Although so far there has been no human-to-human transmission case found in
the world, governments still have to strengthen the surveillance and reporting
system of animal and human epidemics, he noted.
"The virus is very changeable and unstable, which means you do not know when
it can mutate to transmit from person to person. So we have to try hard to find
every first human case in a community to prevent the person from infecting
others," he said.
He highly praised what Chinese health authorities have done in detecting and
treating the first human case in Hunan, calling the work "wonderful and very
important for other countries to learn from."
Omi met He Junyao, China's first confirmed human case, in Wangtan Village of
Xiangtan yesterday afternoon, as the boy returned home from school.
His mother said that her son might have been infected with the virus through
feeding the sick chicken or through watching in the sidelines as they disposed
the bird.
Omi also sent his sympathies to He's parents for the death of He Yin, the
boy's 12-year-old sister, who died of serious pneumonia with unknown causes on
October 17. She can only be considered as a suspected case of bird flu due to a
lack of evidence.
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