# 2759
The vaccination of poultry in places like China and Vietnam has been hailed by those countries as being the prime reason they've managed to keep the H5N1 bird flu virus reasonably contained.
There are critics of the policy who fear that vaccination may hide the infection, and may actually drive the evolution of the virus.
With the recent spotlight on China, brought on by 8 human infections in the month of January, the Ministry of Agriculture has felt compelled to defend their vaccination program.
China defends bird flu vaccination plan despite deaths
By Lucy Hornby
BEIJING (Reuters) – China's Ministry of Agriculture on Friday defended its bird flu vaccination program, stating there had been no outbreaks since last June despite a number of human cases, some fatal, this year.
Human cases and the appearance of dead wild birds in Hong Kong have caused some experts and media reports to question whether the virus is widespread but undetected in China.
Five people died of bird flu in China in January, in regions far removed from each other and in which there were no reported cases of bird flu in birds. Three others have become ill, of which two have recovered, a toddler infected in Hunan and a young man in Guizhou.
Apart from the discovery of a case during routine sampling in eastern China's Jiangsu province in December, Chinese testing has not detected any bird flu since June.
The Ministry of Agriculture said in a report on its website that the strain found in Jiangsu was a variant, requiring the modification of the vaccine program in the surrounding provinces of Zhejiang, Shanghai, Anhui and Shandong.
Of course, the paragraph I bolded is the crux of the matter:
Apart from the discovery of a case during routine sampling in eastern China's Jiangsu province in December, Chinese testing has not detected any bird flu since June.
China has 8 human cases this year, and infected birds flying (and sometimes floating) to Hong Kong, yet they aren't detecting the virus.
Zhong Nanshan attributes that failure to the vaccines in use, stating that they mask the symptoms of infection in poultry.
Obviously the virus is circulating in China.
So a failure on the part of the Ministry of Agriculture to detect it can't really be seen as positive news.
