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Saturday, December 31, 2005A woman who died last week from H5N1 avian influenza had no known contact with poultry and seldom ate poultry meat, Chinese state media said today. The 41-year-old factory worker died on December 21 in the southeastern city of Sanming, Fujian province, an urban area where China has reported no outbreaks of the virus among birds or other animals. ....But she had no contact with infected birds and no bird flu infections were found in Sanming. Zhou's relatives also said that she did not like chicken and duck meat. 'Zhou is unlikely to have been infected from poultry,' the newspaper quoted Fujian disease control official Xu Longshan as saying. Tests on December 23 were positive for the H5N1 bird flu virus but the case was not reported until December 29 'because experts could not explain how she caught the virus', it quoted an unidentified health ministry as saying. All 66,172 poultry raised within 3 kilometres of Zhou's home had been vaccinated by December 5. Investigators tested and culled 230 birds near Zhou's home after the infection was confirmed, but found no infections. Tests on people who had close contact with Zhou also proved negative, the official said. .....On Friday, World Health Organization spokesman Roy Wadia said WHO experts had no additional information about how Zhou might have contracted H5N1 bird flu. Unless her test was a false positive or she had some contact that no one was able to discover this doesn't look good. posted by Sydney on 12/31/2005 08:25:00 AM 0 comments 0 Comments: |
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