China rules out bird flu in girl's death
(Reuters)
Updated: 2005-10-27 21:39

Pneumonia was the cause of death of a 12-year-old girl in a village in central China where an outbreak of bird flu was confirmed earlier this week, Xinhua news agency reported on Thursday.

Chinese health inspector disinfects a truck at a bird flu-hit area in Xiangtan, central China's Hunan province, October 27, 2005. [newsphoto]

The report cited local health officials in Hunan, where some 545 chickens and ducks died from the H5N1 virus, as saying initial blood tests showed the 12-year-old had tested negative for bird flu.

Scientists fear the disease, which is endemic in poultry in China, could mutate into a form that can pass easily between humans, possibly triggering a pandemic.

The girl, He Yin, from Xiangtan County near the provincial capital of Changsha, fell ill and died after eating a chicken that died from an unspecified illness.

Her 10-year-old brother was also sick, but Hong Kong's Cable TV said he too had tested negative for bird flu.

If the tests had proved positive it would have been China's first known human death from bird flu.

Hong Kong's South China Morning Post had reported that the girl and her brother fell ill about a week ago after eating a chicken that had died from an unspecified illness in the village of Wantang, in the southern province of Hunan.

Chinese officials said earlier that they had received no reports of human cases of the virus.

"The Chinese government has already taken ... decisive measures to prevent bird flu and to share information with the international community," Foreign Ministry spokesman Kong Quan told a regular news briefing in Beijing on Thursday.

China reported the Hunan outbreak this week following cases in Inner Mongolia in the north and Anhui province in the east. It said the outbreaks had been brought under control.

Premier Wen Jiabao said earlier that his government was taking effective measures to prevent the spread of the deadly H5N1 strain, including massive culling of birds, quarantines, and vaccinations of residents in areas where there were outbreaks.

Three people on a French island off Africa were being tested on Wednesday in what appeared to be the first suspected human cases outside Asia of bird flu, which experts fear could mutate to spread easily from human to human and become a pandemic.

Indonesia, where at least four people have died from bird flu, was investigating possible new cases in poultry on the holiday island of Bali after the death of several domestic fowl, an Agriculture Ministry official said.