China: H7N9 bird flu spreads, first case in Beijing
Beijing: The disturbing H7N9 bird flu spread in China, where health officials announced on Saturday that a girl of 7 years was a carrier of the virus in Beijing, the first officially registered cases in the capital.
Source : https://www.marocafrik.com/english/China-H7N9-bird...
The child is the daughter of a couple of poultry merchants and therefore likely to have been in contact with sick birds. She was hospitalized in a general stable state , said the Health Bureau of Beijing.
Thursday, she was presented with ILI, with fever, headache and sore throat, and her parents were taken to the hospital, as is customary in China, where many families do not have confidence in the consultations among physicians in their neighborhood.
Friday tests showed she had been infected by H7N9 strain of avian influenza, which had hitherto officially contaminated 43 people in eastern China. Including eleven who died. The National Centre for the fight against infectious diseasesconfirmed the results on Saturday.
The girl's parents have been quarantined, but for now have no symptoms of the disease, said the Beijing Health Bureau.
"Since the beginning of the disease in Shanghai, we have been preparing,"Dr. Cheng Jun, deputy director of the Beijing Ditan Hospital, most famous for infectious diseasessaid to CCTV television . It is also there that the girl was admitted patient.
The Chinese capital is a metropolis of over 20 million people in the north of the country, more than a thousand kilometres from Shanghai, another metropolis which recorded the first human cases of H7N9 virus infection.
The two large conurbations have taken steps to try to limit the contagion between birds, including the closure of live poultry markets and prohibition of releases of racing pigeons, a popular pastime in China.
Shanghai and other major cities have ordered the slaughter of tens of thousands of birds. Chinese poultry industry is also adversely affected by the backlash commercially.
Before the case recently registered in China, the H7N9 strain of avian influenza was not transmitted to humans. As for the H5N1 strain, the most common, scientists fear that viral mutation allows contamination from human to human, which could trigger a pandemic.
H5N1 has killed more than 360 people worldwide between 2003 and March 12, 2013, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), which has repeated in recent days that there was no evidence of transmission of human to human with the H7N9 virus.
The Director General of the World Organization for Animal Health (OIE), Bernard Vallat,on Thursday referred on his side to the "quite exceptional" situation created by the H7N9 virus because its detection is "very difficult" in poultry.
"We are faced with a rather exceptional situation because we are dealing with a very low pathogenic influenza virus in birds and it has the ability to cause severe disease in infected individuals," said Dr Vallat.
The OIE, based in Paris, said that, according to official reports submitted by the Chinese veterinary authorities, "as poultry tested positive for the presence of influenza A virus (H7N9), and is suspected to be the cause of identified human cases show no visible symptoms. " This "makes the detection of this virus in poultry very difficult," said the OIE.
Thursday, she was presented with ILI, with fever, headache and sore throat, and her parents were taken to the hospital, as is customary in China, where many families do not have confidence in the consultations among physicians in their neighborhood.
Friday tests showed she had been infected by H7N9 strain of avian influenza, which had hitherto officially contaminated 43 people in eastern China. Including eleven who died. The National Centre for the fight against infectious diseasesconfirmed the results on Saturday.
The girl's parents have been quarantined, but for now have no symptoms of the disease, said the Beijing Health Bureau.
"Since the beginning of the disease in Shanghai, we have been preparing,"Dr. Cheng Jun, deputy director of the Beijing Ditan Hospital, most famous for infectious diseasessaid to CCTV television . It is also there that the girl was admitted patient.
The Chinese capital is a metropolis of over 20 million people in the north of the country, more than a thousand kilometres from Shanghai, another metropolis which recorded the first human cases of H7N9 virus infection.
The two large conurbations have taken steps to try to limit the contagion between birds, including the closure of live poultry markets and prohibition of releases of racing pigeons, a popular pastime in China.
Shanghai and other major cities have ordered the slaughter of tens of thousands of birds. Chinese poultry industry is also adversely affected by the backlash commercially.
Before the case recently registered in China, the H7N9 strain of avian influenza was not transmitted to humans. As for the H5N1 strain, the most common, scientists fear that viral mutation allows contamination from human to human, which could trigger a pandemic.
H5N1 has killed more than 360 people worldwide between 2003 and March 12, 2013, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), which has repeated in recent days that there was no evidence of transmission of human to human with the H7N9 virus.
The Director General of the World Organization for Animal Health (OIE), Bernard Vallat,on Thursday referred on his side to the "quite exceptional" situation created by the H7N9 virus because its detection is "very difficult" in poultry.
"We are faced with a rather exceptional situation because we are dealing with a very low pathogenic influenza virus in birds and it has the ability to cause severe disease in infected individuals," said Dr Vallat.
The OIE, based in Paris, said that, according to official reports submitted by the Chinese veterinary authorities, "as poultry tested positive for the presence of influenza A virus (H7N9), and is suspected to be the cause of identified human cases show no visible symptoms. " This "makes the detection of this virus in poultry very difficult," said the OIE.
Source : https://www.marocafrik.com/english/China-H7N9-bird...