Accompanied by two ministers from the Ministry of Health and Ministry of Agriculture, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao visited the area most affected by bird flu in Liaoning Province. With this visit, China announced to the world that it had started to face up the avian flu. That is good news for the world's people, because the ongoing spread of avian flu is due to China burying its head in the sand for the last several years.
First of all, China has long concealed the extent of avian flu throughout the country and has repeatedly complained that the real source of the virus was from abroad including Hong Kong. Actually the most likely source of the virus is China.
According to a recent issue of Canjing Magazine, before 2004, the avian flu situation in China was a highly guarded secret. Since 2000, many provincial-level animal husbandry and veterinary stations and many local research institutes have conducted research on avian flu and attempted to develop the vaccine. Besides the highly infectious H5N1 virus, relatively benign viruses such as H9N2 had also posed a threat to the Chinese poultry industry at that time. In other words, since 2000, avian flu has existed in mainland China and a vaccine has been desperately needed, but there are no reports of avian flu outbreaks in the records of the Ministry of Agriculture.
If the Canjing Magazine report does not provide conclusive proof of a cover-up of the epidemic, then another incident can reveal the truth.
In early 2004, the accidental death of many birds as a result of a fake avian flu vaccine in Xingle City, Hebei Province was revealed. Further investigations found that the producer of the fake vaccine, Li Zhongqi, had been selling the home-made vaccine since July 2001. As of February 2004, Li had sold 944 bottles of vaccine.
A current affairs TV program entitled "China Police Service Report", run by the political division of Ministry of Public Security and broadcast to over 100 TV stations in China, confessed that more than one year ago, during the early virus outbreaks, Li Zhongqi had produced the vaccine at home in order to profit from people's fears of the virus. Li collected vaccine that was left over, re-labelled them to whatever the customer wanted and then sold them to Yang Jun for eight Yuan per bottle. Yang then sold them to Zhi Yong in Xingle City for 17 Yuan per bottle and Zhi finally sold them to chicken producers for 50 Yuan per bottle.
On November 10 this year, Shanghai Diyicajing Daily (First Finance and Economics Daily in Shanghai) revealed more. The report said that according to an article titled "The Significance of the Bird Flu's History and Public Health" found in the 4th issue of the Bulletin of Biology in 2002, from 1995 to 1999, Tang Xiuying and others isolated twenty-eight H9N2 strains, one H1N1 strain, one H3N8 strain, two H4N6 strains, and three H5N1 strains from chickens, ducks, partridges and geese. Of these, the H5N1 virus isolated from geese was a highly pathogenic strain and the rest were less pathogenic strains.
In February 1999, researcher Guo Yuanji from China Preventive Medicine Institute and others found five H9N2 human infection cases which were all later cured. This researcher also confirmed that "H9N2 subtype influenza is widely distributed among Chinese chicken", and the virus has already been transmitted to humans.
In 2004, researcher Li Zhaohua from the Laboratory of Microbiology of Guangzhou Center of Disease Control and Prevention published an article in the "China Laboratory and Clinical Virology Magazine." The conclusion was that the H9N2 subtype influenza virus existed among the chicken population in the Guangzhou area and that particular strain has in fact infected people.
Neither the Chinese government, the State Department, the Ministry of Agriculture nor the Ministry of Health have yet confirmed facts mentioned above and even less so will they admit that China's delays in addressing the outbreaks have now contributed to the spread of bird flu around the world and delayed the development of a possible cure. In fact, the current preventative measures in China cause people to worry as well.
In 1971 over 10 million fowl were wiped out in a flu epidemic in California. Later analysis of the spread of the outbreak showed that the main vector for the spread of the virus were the veterinarians going to farms to give injections to non-infected fowl. China front line efforts in combating bird flu, from the news shown on TV, involve veterinarians giving injections to domestic fowl but with an obvious lack of disinfection measures for themselves. Their clothes, shoes and even instruments can probably become carriers of the virus, just like what happened in the United States in 1971.
Also, as seen from TV reports, when dealing with infected birds, some staff only wear masks and gloves but no goggles. This is really dangerous. According to previous experience, bird flu is like all other flu viruses which can enter people's bodies through the eyes.
Now although the Chinese Communist Party may be alert to the spread of bird flu, the feeling at the grass roots is that the flu is preventable and curable thus preventative quarantine measures have been neglected. Of course another problem is that sourcing and distributing protective clothing to the population requires massive financial resources. China's situation is very disquieting.
China must now confess to its complicity in the current spread of bird flu.
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