Screenshot taken from http://www.chinacdc.cn/en/ as of 0600 hrs EDT 4/1/13
# 7049
For the newshounds of Flublogia, the past 48 hours have been very busy, as dozens of stories (of widely varying substance and believability) have emerged out of China regarding the H7N9 virus.
You’ll find multiple news threads being curated on the two major flu sites (FluTrackers & Flu Wiki), each filled with machine translated reports from across Asia.
Some of these machine translated reports would suggest there are more cases – if not confirmed, at least under suspicion – in China. Additionally, there are `speculative pieces’ – like this one out of Taiwan – that suggest a wider spread of the virus.
But how much credence we should give these stories remains very much in doubt.
Some of these reports are attributed to anonymous sources, or are based on next-to-impossible-to-verify messages circulating on Chinese social media sites, like Weibo. That doesn’t make them false, just hard to corroborate.
Like everywhere else in the world, there are political and social agendas in China that can influence how, and what, gets reported online and in the newspapers.
Making matters worse, we often are dealing with machine-translations - which while often quite interesting – lack nuance, and can be difficult to properly interpret.
There is an inevitable `fog of flu’ at the start of almost every disease outbreak that we’ve witnessed over the years; details get confused, different theories are offered, rumors abound, and the narrative gradually changes over time.
So my tendency is to take all of these reports with a fairly large grain of salt, and refrain from posting them on AFD until I can get some (admittedly subjective) degree of comfort regarding their veracity and/or value.
The good news is, while I doubt they are telling us everything they know, Beijing has been (for them, anyway) unusually forthcoming regarding this outbreak.
Viral sequences were deposited at GISAID in a very timely manner, and the China’s CDC website posted a pretty good Q&A on this virus on Sunday (see graphic at top of page).
Actions that would have taken months (if ever) to happen during the SARS outbreak a decade ago in China.
Small steps perhaps, but encouraging nonetheless.
The next few days (and possibly weeks) will tell us a lot about this emergent virus, and the threat it could pose. H7N9 may turn out to be little more than an interesting footnote in the varied history of bird flu, or it may become the next big thing.
Stay tuned.
