# 2742
This morning speculation is running high on whether mainland China is in the midst of a much larger bird flu outbreak than they have admitted.
This is nothing new, of course. Most observers have been openly skeptical of the sparse reporting coming out of China for years.
Their reported number of human cases, running at a per capita rate 1/50th of that of neighboring Vietnam, simply didn't make much sense. Not when south-central China appears to be the cradle of H5N1, along with many other emerging flu viruses.
Sadly, China has a long history of suppressing `bad news' , often to the detriment of their own people.
Their cover up of the SARS outbreak in 2002-2003 undoubtedly allowed the virus to spread, and cost hundreds of lives both there, and around the world.
Between the admission of 8 human H5N1 infections in January, and the discovery of dead birds in Hong Kong carrying the virus, many voices are asking the same question.
What is going on in China?
I've excerpts from two reports this morning. First from Bloomberg News.
China Has Bird Flu Outbreak, Hong Kong Adviser Says (Update2)
By Simeon Bennett and Theresa Tang
Feb. 3 (Bloomberg) -- China has suffered an outbreak of bird flu among poultry even though the mainland government has yet to report such an incident, said Lo Wing-Lok, a Hong Kong government adviser on infectious diseases.
“There’s no doubt of an outbreak of bird flu in China, though the government hasn’t admitted it,” Lo said in a telephone interview today. “Inefficient communication between the Hong Kong and mainland authorities is an ongoing problem. Hong Kong has not been well-informed by the mainland.”
Eight people have been infected with the H5N1 strain of avian influenza in China this year, the most in a single month since 2003 when the lethal virus was first detected in humans, according to the World Health Organization. Three out of 12 dead birds found on Hong Kong’s Lantau Island tested positive for the strain, stoking concerns the virus is circulating widely among birds in southern Guangdong province which borders Hong Kong.
China hasn’t reported any cases of H5N1 among birds since December. The human cases show the virus must be circulating among birds, said Vincent Martin, a senior technical advisor on avian flu for the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.
“There must be some cases which have not been reported,” Martin said in a telephone interview today. “It’s not normal that we don’t receive any confirmation or any reports of outbreaks in poultry.”
And then we get this, from BusinessWeek's Eye On Asia blog. An editorial more than a news story, but asking the question that many are asking this morning.
Is China Covering up a New Bird Flu Epidemic?
Posted by: Frederik Balfour on February 03
Is China covering up a new outbreak of bird flu? Certainly there seems to be very strong evidence it is. There have already been eight reported cases of humans contracting the potential deadly H5N1 virus, from which five people have died this year. And despite the fact that Hong Kong officials have been finding dead birds infected with the virus washing up onto its shores in recent days that likely came from the mainland, China has not made any official statement concerning an outbreak among birds. At least one Hong Kong health advisor to the government, Lo Wing-lok, says the government “just isn’t admitting” to the problem.
If this is true, both Chinese health officials and the state media must share the blame. Surely after so many human infections people must be asking questions of how the caught the virus, as human to human transmission is highly unlikely. But China has a horrible track record of squelching bad news at the cost of public safety, usually with the complicity of the local media. Back in 2003 Guangdong provincials covered up the SARS epidemic for 22 weeks before informing neighboring Hong Kong. By that time it was too late, and nearly 300 people died of SARS in Hong Kong, as did hundreds more worldwide. You would have thought that China had learned its lesson back then.
