Vaccine mission: Jabs for all 14b poultry
By Zhang Feng (China Daily)
Updated: 2005-11-16 06:41

China yesterday set itself a mammoth task: to vaccinate the country's entire poultry population of 14 billion.

"We are in the process of vaccinating all the poultry in the country," said Jia Youling, director-general of the Ministry of Agriculture's veterinary bureau, amidst reports of new bird-flu outbreaks in West China.

Jia said the central government would cover 50 to 80 per cent of the cost of vaccination of the poultry which account for a fifth of the world total Xinhua news agency reported. He did not provide additional details during an online question-and-answer session.

The UN Food and Agriculture Organization has encouraged countries to vaccinate birds while employing other control methods, such as mass culling and restricted movement of poultry in and around infected areas.

On Monday, the ministry said production of bird flu vaccine was being ramped up by increasing capacity.

Experts have warned that if China cannot control repeated outbreaks of bird flu, human cases of the disease are inevitable.

The Ministry of Agriculture confirmed last night that two new outbreaks were reported near Urumqi in the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. In one case 1,347 chickens died. The local health authorities have culled 322,500 chickens within 3 kilometres of the epidemic zones.

Meanwhile, scientists in Beijing are trying to determine whether a girl who died in Central China's Hunan Province after developing high fever is the country's first human case of bird flu.

The results of the investigation, which is almost complete, will be made public this week, said an expert who did not want to be identified.

The 12-year-old girl is one of the three suspected human cases in Hunan. She died on October 17 but two others, her brother and a 37-year-old teacher, have recovered after having similar symptoms.

China is yet to report a confirmed human case but if it does, "it's not something that's earth-shattering in the grand scheme of things because there are human cases elsewhere," Roy Wadia, the World Health Organization (WHO) spokesman in Beijing, was quoted by Xinhua as saying.

"It would not be a surprising development. It just means surveillance systems are better now," he said.

More than 60 people have died of bird flu in Asia since 2003 and the fatality rate is estimated to be one in two for human infections.

On Monday, a six-member WHO team joined Chinese experts in Hunan and Beijing for field investigation and laboratory tests.

Meanwhile, Vice-Health Minister Wang Longde arrived in Liaoning Province, where a woman who had close contact with dead chickens has developed pneumonia.

The woman is in hospital and experts have not been able to determine what caused her illness.

Wang is in the Northeast China province for strengthening supervision and control measures against possible poultry-to-human transmission of the virus.

(China Daily 11/16/2005 page1)