Following a Ministry of Health (MOH) announcement of China's eighth human case if bird flu on Monday, MOH spokesman Mao Qun'an said yesterday that the main reasons for human bird flu infections were a lack of effective surveillance in villages and towns as well as delayed reporting of outbreaks.

A 6-year-old boy, surnamed Ouyang, in Guiyang County in central China's Hunan Province is reported to be in critical condition in hospital. Experts have meanwhile found ill chickens in the area where the boy lives, but have yet to test whether they are infected with the H5N1 virus.

Most of the human cases on the Chinese mainland were reported after the patients were admitted to hospital before investigations were conducted in the patients' villages, Mao said.

At village clinics or township hospitals, the human infections were typically diagnosed as pneumonia from unknown causes because doctors there are not adequately qualified to detect bird flu infections.

As a result, the best window of opportunity for treatment was missed, leading to the three fatalities in China, he said.

The monitoring and reporting system of infectious diseases now covers 66 percent of China's township hospitals, and more than 90 percent of hospitals at county levels or above.

More village doctors will be encouraged, and financially supported, to join the system, Mao said, adding that all hospitals have been asked to scrutinize pneumonia cases without clear causes.

In addition, the Ministry of Agriculture (MOA) also announced last night that it was the deadly H5N1 bird flu virus that killed 16,000 quails in a farm in Guiyang, Southwest China's Guizhou Province, between January 1 and 6.

In view of this, the government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) yesterday suspended the import of poultry and poultry meat from Guizhou.

In another development, the MOA said a wild bird in east China's Anhui Province has been identified as a carrier of the human strain of the avian flu virus.

A gene sequencing analysis has shown that the virus detected in a dead bird was 99.6 percent homologous with the human strain.
 
The dead bird was found in a pond by Guo Fusheng, a researcher with the ministry's animal quarantine institute.

Anhui previously reported two human cases of bird flu: a 24-year-old farmer named Zhou who died on November 10 and a 35-year-old farmer named Xu who died on November 22, 2005.

(China Daily, Xinhua News Agency January 11, 2006)