China's government said yesterday it was dispatching experts to stop the misuse of an antiviral drug on poultry and denied a report that farmers were encouraged to use it, possibly making it ineffective for treating deadly bird flu in humans.
"We'll take measures soon to curb the action," an Agriculture Ministry spokesman, Xu Shixin, was quoted as saying by the government-run China Daily newspaper.
The report didn't say how widely the drug amantadine, meant to treat humans only, was misused.
The Washington Post on Saturday said that widespread misuse by Chinese poultry farmers led to the rise of a drug-resistant form of the H5N1 bird flu virus found in Thailand and Vietnam. The Post said Chinese farmers were encouraged to give the drug to millions of chickens in their drinking water in the late 1990s to suppress bird flu outbreaks. The Agriculture Ministry yesterday denied the report.
"This report is groundless," the ministry said in a statement faxed to reporters. "The Chinese government has never approved the use of amantadine to prevent avian flu."
The statement did not say, however, whether farmers were using the drug anyway and the ministry's press office refused to reveal any further information.
Health experts worry that bird flu might mutate into a form that can spread directly from person to person, setting off a pandemic that could claim millions of lives. People killed by the flu so far have contracted it from sick birds.
Asia's latest outbreak began late last year and has killed 38 people in Vietnam, 12 in Thailand and four in Cambodia. China has not recorded any human cases but two outbreaks in its remote west killed more than 1,000 wild birds last month.
The WHO said it had found rising resistance to amantadine in the H5N1 virus in several countries, including in China. The WHO representative in Beijing, Henk Bekedam, said China is "a little more than the average" in its prevalence of the drug-resistant form.
"We are more and more concerned that this antiviral might not be that useful any longer," he said.
As a result, the WHO is telling governments to stop stockpiling amantadine and to acquire other antiviral drugs such as Tamiflu to which H5N1 hasn't developed a resistance, Bekedam said.
The UN health agency has asked Chinese authorities to confirm that the other drugs aren't being used in agriculture, he said. Bekedam said he was also concerned by the lack of regulation on the public availability of amantadine in China, where it is widely sold without a prescription.
"That makes it very easy for anybody to buy it," he said.
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