China confirms two human cases of bird flu

An investigation did not find the two had contacts with fowls before they fell ill, it said/XINHUA

A 21-year-old woman and a 31-year-old man, who developed symptoms on February 2 and February 3, respectively, tested positive for H5N1 virus on Sunday, the ministry said, citing local health authorities.

“They are in critical condition and medical workers are carrying out emergency treatment,” the ministry said in a statement. “No epidemiological connections have been found between the two cases.”

An investigation did not find the two had contacts with fowls before they fell ill, it said.

People who had close contacts with the two patients have been put under medical observation, but none of them has been found ill so far.

The human-infected highly pathogenic avian influenza is an acute respiratory infectious disease mainly caused by the deadly H5N1 subtype virus. The main symptoms include high fever and pneumonia.

The human case of bird flu is mainly transmitted from poultry to humans and there are no reported outbreaks of sustained human-to-human transmission.

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XINHUA

Xinhua News Agency, founded on November 7, 1931, is China’s national news agency as well as a global news and information network. Xinhua has set up a global news and information gathering network, with headquarters in Beijing, 33 domestic bureaus in provinces, autonomous regions and municipalities plus the special administrative regions of Hong Kong and Macao, as well as 140 bureaus in the rest of the world. Xinhua is yet to set up a bureau in Taiwan, where it has posted resident correspondents. Xinhua provides its worldwide subscribers with news and financial information products in the forms of text, photo, graphics, audio, video, and mobile phone text messages 24 hours a day in eight languages: Chinese, English, French, Russian, Spanish, Arabic, Portuguese and Japanese.

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