WHO warning after new China Bird Flu death

BEIJING—China’s third confirmed bird flu death highlights the danger of small, undetected H5N1 outbreaks, the World Health Organisation (WHO) said, as authorities probed how the victim fell ill.
China’s health ministry announced on Thursday that a 41-year-old woman from the eastern province of Fujian had died on December 21 after contracting the H5N1 virus about two weeks earlier.
However the woman, a factory worker, lived in an area where no bird flu outreaks had been reported, repeating a pattern seen in China this year.
“We still don’t know through which channel this woman was infected. The investigations are continuing,” an official with the health ministry’s media office said Friday. China has confirmed a total of seven human cases of bird flu in 2005 — all over the past two months — resulting in three deaths.
Thirty-one outbreaks of the virus among poultry have been reported across large swathes of China this year, but not all the human victims were living in affected areas.
The WHO’s spokesman in Beijing, Roy Wadia, told that China’s efforts at containing the big, reported outbreaks were impressive. But he said many people were still in danger from coming into contact with infected poultry via small, undetected outbreaks.
“If it’s just a few sporadic birds dying off, people are then exposed and then get sick and die — it means it’s a very difficult thing to stop when it’s on a small scale,” Wadia said. “People have to become more aware that the birds that are dying could be infected with H5N1, and reporting has to be done fast. It’s a case of awareness and strengthening animal surveillance at the grass-roots level”.
Wadia said that China was aware of the challenge and was quickly improving its animal surveillance and health monitoring system. He said the fact that all seven confirmed cases had been reported recently indicated the government may be succeeding in improving detection methods, and not that the problem was necessarily worsening.
“Our impression is, given the greater awareness in the public health system in general about the bird flu, there are ... more aggressive attempts to identify it at the outset,” he said. With the seventh confirmed human case coming as the year drew to a close, Wadia described 2005 as a “very signficant” year in the fight against bird flu on the Chinese mainland.
“Human cases have been identified, surveillance has been strengthened and it’s been improving all the time,” he said. But Wadia echoed warnings from other WHO officials and the Chinese government that the bird flu threat remained high.
“This is not the end of the road. There will be more outbreaks in poultry and possibly more human cases on the Chinese mainland and other countries,” he said. Wadia also repeated warnings made by WHO regional director Shigeru Omi last week that China’s refusal to share information about the animal outbreaks was holding back the global fight against the virus.
“It leaves a question mark over how the virus might or might not be changing in this part of the world,” he said. China’s health ministry has passed on information about the human cases, but the agriculture ministry has not shared data about the outbreaks among poultry. More than 70 people have died from bird flu throughout Asia since late 2003, with nearly 40 of the fatalities occurring this year.
China is seen as a potential flashpoint for a feared global pandemic because it has the world’s biggest poultry population combined with often primitive farming conditions where humans and animals live in close proximity.
The virus is currently spread among animals and from animals to humans. The global pandemic would occur if H5N1 becomes easily transferrable between humans. Close contact between people and infected poultry raises that danger.—Agencies
                                                                                                                                                                         
                                                                                                                                                                       
Bubbling economy means water woes in China

BEIJING—Industrial pollution, unscientific waste disposal and over-exploitation of underground resources have made China’s drinking water among the most unsafe in the world, environmental experts say. The country’s water woes were thrown into the spotlight this week with the release of government statistics and reports showing the powerful impact on the nation’s ecosystem of two decades of rapid economic growth.
“When you want economic growth, there are a lot of things you don’t pay attention to,” said Kenneth Leung, an ecotoxicologist from the University of Hong Kong. “This is a trade-off”. China’s environmental bureau said on Wednesday that underground water in 90 percent of Chinese cities was polluted and that the situation was getting worse. The pollution is generally caused by industrial waste from factories or untreated human waste discharged into rivers and then seeping into the ground.
In a report on Wednesday, Xinhua news agency quoted E Jingping, vice minister of water resources, as saying about 300 million Chinese rural residents, or one-third of the total rural population, drink unsafe water. Previous government reports have said more than 70 percent of China’s rivers and lakes are polluted, while about 400 of China’s 600 largest cities suffer from water shortages.
Environmental experts warn the pollution of China’s rivers, lakes and wetlands has a knock-on effect as it contaminates underground water, which China’s cities are becoming more reliant on for drinking needs. This increasing reliance has led to an over-exploitation of ground water, which in turn exacerbates the pollution, they say. Meanwhile two large industrial toxic spills in China’s rivers in as many months have forced authorities to launch major cleanup campaigns and cut the drinking water supply to millions of people over health fears.
Underground water resources are being overtapped at unsustainable levels in 164 regions, covering some 190,000 square kilometers (76,000 square miles) largely in the north, according to earlier state reports. Scientists said the over-exploitation has caused polluted surface water to seep into aquifers, or underground reservoirs, and contaminate underground water that is normally a clean source of drinking water. “After the ground water has run out ... surface water is more easily seeped into it,” Ma Jun, a Beijing-based independent environmental consultant, said. “So this has become a vicious cycle”.
Unscientific treatment of industrial and urban waste as well as unsafe disposal are also to blame, according to Zhao Zhangyuan, a retired expert from the Chinese Environmental Science Research Insitutue. “The biggest ‘cancers’ are urban landfills, petrol stations and industrial and agricultural effluent,” he wrote in a recent article. Landfill sites should be well-lined to ensure that there is no leakage into the nearby ground water sources but Zhang said much of China’s waste, some 72 billion tons, are causing serious contamination at old-style landfills.
“(It is) very difficult to find unpolluted ground water nowadays,” he wrote. “The more economically developed a place is, the more varieties and quantities of poisonous materials it has.” Scientists say the pollution of underground water has seriously threatened drinking water quality. High levels of heavy metal and nitrates as well as petroleum chemical products and pesticides are found in China’s contaminated underground water in many places, a Beijing-based environmental scientist told newsmen.
Exposure to high levels of nitrate in drinking water has been linked to a number of chronic health conditions, including birth defects, cancer and hypertension, the university scientist, who did not want to be named, said. Underground water is the source of drinking water for nearly 70 percent of China’s population and is the source of some 40 percent of the country’s agricultural irrigation. The Chinese government has said it intends to improve water quality. It has allocated more than 18 billion yuan (2.17 billion US dollars) to build 800,000 drinking water projects in rural areas since 2000, and intends to provide safe drinking water to every rural family by 2020.—Agencies

                                                                                                                                                                           
China abolishes 2,600-year-old agriculture tax

BEIJING—China’s 2,600-year-old agricultural tax will be rescinded as of Jan. 1, 2006, after China’s top legislature voted on Thursday to adopt a motion on the regulations revoking the agricultural tax.
Wan Baorui, former vice minister of agriculture and vice chairman of the Agriculture and Rural Affairs Committee of National People’s Congress said that the abolition of the agricultural tax demonstrates that industry has outgrown agriculture to some extent along with the country’s economic development. And the country ushers into a new era of “industry subsidizing agriculture”.
Official figures show that agriculture contributed to 13.1 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product (GDP) in 2004, and industry and tertiary trade contributed to 46.2 percent and 40.7 percent respectively.
Agricultural tax, China’s most ancient tax category, started to be collected in 594 BC. From that time, agricultural tax has existed for 2,600 years in China with dominant rural economy.
During the more than 2,000 years, agricultural tax was always the main source of the country’s coffer. Since the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, agriculture has made great contribution to the country’s economic development.
In 1953-1985 period, Chinese government purchased grains, cotton and other agricultural products with unified prices which were much lower than the prices in free market, so as to save money for developing industry.
In this way, Chinese farmers contributed 600 billion to 800 billion yuan (about US $75 — 100 billion) to the country’s industrialization.
Over recent years, the gaps between city and countryside, urban citizens and rural residents were widened. Therefore, solving issues concerning agriculture, countryside and farmers have turned to be the urgent task for the Chinese government.
In 2005, the Chinese government and the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China vowed to construct a “new countryside” so as to narrow the gap between city and countryside. Wan said, the abolition of agricultural tax was only one of the important steps to fulfill the construction of the “new countryside”.—INP

Chashma symbol of Sino-Pak ties: Sun
From Javed Akhtar (APP)

BEIJING—Chashma power plant is “another symbolic project of the successful cooperation between China and Pakistan in the field of nuclear power, reports Chinese media quoting Chairman of the China Atomic Energy Authority Sun Qin.
Chashma nuclear power plant had become a successful model of “south-south cooperation”. “It has brought about substantial economic and social effects and done due contribution to the sustainable development and improvement of people’s living standard of Pakistan.
President of the China National Nuclear Corporation Kang Rixin expressed the hope that the new project would be completed in schedule and with good quality, to serve as another symbol of their bilateral cooperation.
The contract concerning the Chashma-1 was signed in 1991 and the nuclear power plant was connected to the grid in June 2000 and put into commercial operation in September that year.
Following the successful operation of the Chashma-1, the Chashma-2 contract was signed in May 2004.

China eyes increased energy co-op with US

BEIJING—China and the United States should increase co-operation on energy issues ranging from crude oil production overseas to civilian nuclear programs, China’s top economic planning body said in a statement on its Web site.
Co-operation should be deeper and more efficient, with priority placed on promoting stability in producing nations and secure oil shipping lanes, the National Development and Reform Commission said.
The world economy would benefit if China has secure energy supplies, but U.S. concerns about the rise of China’s fast-growing economy could lead to restrictive legislation, the commission added. “Geopolitics may lead to wider restrictions in terms of the relevant American policies, because a stronger China is considered a challenge to the United States,” the statement said.
Earlier this year, a political furor in the United States scuttled an $18.5 billion bid by China’s top offshore producer CNOOC Ltd. (0883.HK) for America’s Unocal Corp. and the fallout raised concerns in China about U.S. investment policies.—Agencies