Beijing suspends poultry trade against Bird Flu
From Max Lee
The Daily Mail’s Special
Correspondent in Beijing

BEIJING—All live poultry trade and downtown poultry feeding was temporarily suspended here as of Monday, an effort by the municipal authority to prevent an outbreak of bird flu.
In compliance with the central government's measures against bird flu, Beijing has suspended poultry trading and culling in all its 168 markets, poultry feeding in downtown areas and poultry imports from regions outside the national capital, according to the headquarters in charge of vital animal epidemic prevention and control.
The municipal government also ordered the closing of bird markets, the cessation of domesticated pigeon flying and the quarantine of imported poultry products through land, railroad and air.
Officials with the Beijing Industrial and Commercial Bureau said those who disobey the orders will face stern penalty.
The Chinese central government has committed to allocating two billion yuan(25 million US dollars) out of this year's central budget to set up a bird flu prevention and control fund and createa national headquarters to supervise the work. China has slaughtered innumerable sick poultry after bird flu was spotted in various regions this year.
So far China's Ministry of Health has reported three pneumonia cases with unidentified causes in Xiangtan County, central-south China's Hunan Province, where an H5N1 bird flu epidemic broke out recently.
Experts said they would not rule out the possibility of human infection of the deadly H5N1 bird flu, according to a spokesman for the ministry.
Beijing also announced that 6 million birds had been slaughtered around the site of China’s most recent bird flu outbreak, and the World Health Organization said it had been asked to help in the reopened investigation of the country’s possible first human cases of the virus.
The escalation of anti-bird flu measures in the world’s most populous country came as a meeting of hundreds of international experts in Geneva opened with warnings that a global human flu pandemic is inevitable and could cost the global economy at least $800 billion.
“It is only a matter of time before an avian flu virus ... acquires the ability to be transmitted from human to human, sparking the outbreak of human pandemic influenza,” WHO director general Lee Jong-wook told the gathering. Experts fear the bird flu virus that is sweeping through Asia and has entered Europe could mutate into a form that is easily passed between humans, producing a pandemic that could kill millions.
The virulent H5N1 strain of the virus has killed at least 62 people in Asia since 2003, and resulted in the death or destruction of millions of birds.
Beijing on Sunday reopened an investigation into whether bird flu killed a 12-year-old girl and sickened two people last month in cases originally ruled not to be H5N1.
Roy Wadia, a WHO spokesman in Beijing, said on Monday discussions were underway with Chinese officials about what role the agency could play in the investigation, and a decision was likely within days.
China has had no confirmed human infections. But it has imposed increasingly strict measures following warnings that a human case was inevitable if China can’t prevent outbreaks among its 5.2 billion chickens, ducks and other poultry.
Experts are especially worried about China because of the vast scale of its poultry industry and because major migration routes for wild birds pass over it.
The culling was unusually large by Chinese standards. Xinhua said rules required the destruction of all birds within two miles of an infection site.
Authorities closed all of Beijing’s 168 live poultry markets as a precaution against the possible spread of the virus in the city, state television reported.
In Shanghai, China’s largest city, sales of live ducks, quail and other birds have been banned, officials said.
In Vietnam, a leading European health official conceded the European Union should have acted earlier to help Asian nations fight bird flu and pledged $35.7 million to help the region combat the virus.
“The EU should have reacted more quickly to help Southeast Asia to tackle the problem,” Health Commissioner Markos Kyprianou said. “It’s better late than never”.
Also Monday, Swiss drugmaker Roche said it would increase production of the anti-viral drug Tamiflu tenfold to try to cope with international demand, which has skyrocketed because it is believed to be the best known treatment against a possible pandemic.
Roche said it would increase production of Tamiflu to make 300 million treatments by 2007 to try to meet government orders.
At the Geneva meeting, the World Bank’s lead economist for the East Asia and the Pacific, Milan Brahmbhatt, warned that “panic and disruption” caused by a global human flu pandemic could cause world gross domestic product to drop by 2 percent or more — amounting to about $800 billion over one year.
The three possible Chinese bird flu victims lived in or near Wantang village in central Hunan province where 545 chickens and ducks died of bird flu last month.
The girl, He Yin, who came into “close contact with sick birds,” died last month after developing a high fever, Xinhua said. Her 9-year-old brother was hospitalized with similar symptoms but recovered. The third suspected case was a 36-year-old middle school teacher who reportedly fell ill after chopping raw chicken while suffering from a minor injury to his hand, Xinhua said. He also was recovering.
All three initially tested negative for H5N1. But Wadia said it was not unusual for initial tests for a virus such as H5N1 to be wrong. Final results could take weeks.

China holds renewable energy conference
Bureau Report

BEIJING—President Hu Jintao pledged Monday that China will generate more clean power as it opened an international conference on renewable energy amid rising oil prices and nationwide electricity shortages.
Some 1,200 delegates from 80 countries joined Chinese leaders at the Great Hall of the People, the seat of China's legislature in central Beijing, to discuss using solar power, wind energy and hydropower instead of coal and oil.
"Strengthening the development and use of renewable energies is a must for us to address the increasingly serious energy and environmental issues," Hu said in a statement that was read to the conference by Vice Premier Zeng Peiyan.
Areas throughout the country suffer from chronic power shortages, prompting many cities to schedule blackouts in summer to reduce the strain on their generating stations.
"China attaches great importance to ... renewable energy and takes it as one of the most important instruments for promoting social and economic development," the statement said.
The government says China uses renewable energy to meet 7 percent of its total needs and plans to increase that to 15 percent by 2020.
Participants at the conference included European Cabinet ministers and the director of the US Energy Department's National Renewable Energy Laboratory.
"Oil price increases which hit importing developing countries especially hard highlight the need for alternate energy supplies," said a message from UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan that was read at the meeting. China has increased its emphasis on the use of solar and other alternative power sources out of concern for both the environmental costs of the country's heavy use of fossil fuels and the security risks of its growing reliance on imported oil.
But oil and inexpensive but dirty coal still account for most of China's energy consumption. China is the world's second-largest producer of greenhouse gases after the United States.
China's energy consumption has soared in recent years amid economic growth that this year is expected to top 9 percent.
China says it is building clusters of windmills for power generation off several areas along China's eastern coast.
 

WHO to probe possible human Bird Flu case

BEIJING—The World Health Organization confirmed on Monday it would help probe a possible human case of bird flu in China, where 6 million birds were culled in an area hit by the country’s fourth outbreak of the virus in a month.
China has yet to report any human cases of bird flu but said on Sunday it would invite WHO experts to investigate three suspicious cases of pneumonia in the southern province of Hunan, the site of one of the recent outbreaks among birds.
Beijing had previously denied any connection between the deadly H5N1 form of the bird flu virus and the pneumonia cases. Tests on the three did not show the presence of H5N1, the official Xinhua news agency said, but it added the virus could not be ruled out due to the fact the three lived close to the site of the outbreak.
One of the pneumonia patients, a 12-year-old girl, died.
Tests on the girl’s brother did reveal a “suspicious positive,” and WHO would now work with Chinese health authorities to establish if he had contracted H5N1.
“It’s not uncommon for some of the tests that are taken, particularly in early disease, for them to be negative,” said Julie Hall, who oversees WHO’s fight against bird flu in China.
“We’re looking at ways we can provide the skills and assistance that will best help China to investigate these cases and hopefully confirm some diagnosis,” Hall told reporters.
Authorities have placed 192 people in Hunan, one of whom has acute bronchitis, under medical observation, the China Daily said, citing the health ministry. They all had contact either with the three pneumonia cases or dead birds.
In the northeastern province of Liaoning, all poultry within a 3-km (2-mile) radius of the site where the H5N1 virus was found last week had been killed, Xinhua news agency said.
Bird flu has killed more than 60 people in Asia and infected at least 123 since late 2003. In almost every case, the virus appears to have been transmitted to humans through contact with birds.
In the capital, Beijing, the government banned the sale of live poultry and raising of birds, which are also not allowed to be brought into the city from outside provinces, the Beijing News said.
Workers in one of Beijing’s largest poultry markets played chess on empty cages on Monday, and vats used to scrub down dead birds sat quiet.
The Beijing government had temporarily closed all bird markets too, the report added, and banned pigeon-fancying events.
Experts say the virus must be stopped in poultry to prevent more people catching it and nowhere is that fight more crucial than in densely populated Asia, where farmers and city dwellers live side-by-side with poultry and other livestock.
But scientists say it is steadily mutating and could acquire changes that make it easy to spread from human to human, triggering a pandemic in which millions could die.

—The Daily Mail-China Daily news exchange item