China was facing allegations yesterday it was the source of the Asia-wide bird flu outbreak as the World Health Organization (WHO) asked for an explanation of the deaths of two tourists a year ago.
The respected British weekly New Scientist said it believed the outbreak began in southern China early last year after a poultry vaccination scheme went wrong and that it had since been covered up.
Foreign ministry spokeswoman Zhang Qiyue (
"We believe that such an allegation is totally inaccurate, groundless and doesn't respect science," she told a regular briefing.
The report emerged as Chinese officials ordered a cull of up to 200,000 birds and quarantined nearly 40 farmers who had been in contact with sick birds as it tried to contain three separate outbreaks of bird flu.
China also said yesterday it had decided to halt exports of poultry from the three areas -- southwestern Guangxi province and Hubei and Hunan provinces -- while banning imports from Indonesia, Pakistan and Laos.
The cover-up allegations have put the spotlight back on the deaths of two Hong Kong tourists who visited China in February last year.
The WHO last week asked the Chinese government for more information as part of efforts to establish the history of the bird flu outbreak which has now been detected in 10 Asian nations.
"It's definitely worth getting a final conclusion on the case," said Roy Wadia, a Beijing-based WHO spokesman.
An eight-year-old Hong Kong girl fell ill and died in Fujian Province last February while visiting her family.
Her father died 12 days later after returning to Hong Kong, and post-mortem specimens showed he had come down with the H5N1 strain of the bird flu virus which has claimed 10 lives in Vietnam and Thailand.
The WHO has warned about making any premature link between the deaths and the current bird flu outbreak.
"There could have been several emerging sources," said Wadia, adding that so far the UN health body had received no response from Beijing.
New Scientist, quoting unidentified health experts, said the outbreak "probably" began in China.
"A combination of official cover-up and questionable farming practices allowed it to turn into the epidemic now under way," said the magazine.
The magazine said it suspected the H5N1 virus was disseminated through a mass poultry vaccination by farmers anxious to protect their flocks from the disease which triggered a mass cull in Hong Kong in 1997.
A slight genetic mismatch between the virus and the vaccine could have caused the Chinese birds to harbor the virus but show no symptoms and then pass it on to other flocks as they were traded, it said.
Confirmation of a cover-up would be embarrassing for China -- the country was strongly criticized last year after it emerged that the authorities had hidden the outbreak of SARS for months.
While it was not until Tuesday that China admitted to the presence of bird flu, local government officials appear to have adopted preventive measures several days beforehand.
A farming couple in Hubei Province was put in quarantine as early as last Friday and released on Wednesday, according to a local government spokesman.
Last February's two deaths are the only recent bird flu-related fatalities linked to China that the WHO knows about, Wadia said.
They received relatively little attention because China and Hong Kong soon became preoccupied with SARS, he said.
Officials in Fujian's Pingtang County, where the girl died, said there was no detailed post-mortem investigation and that a conclusion about the cause of death was never reached.
"The cause isn't clear," said an official at the Pingtang County Hospital. "The girl died very quickly. She was hospitalized in early February and died the next day."
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