Chinese authorities have closed some live bird markets in an attempt to stop the spread of a deadly strain of bird flu. A vendor, above, washed a chicken stall in a poultry market in Hefei, China, shortly before it was due to be closed Thursday.
More than 1,000 dead ducks have been fished out of a river Sichuan, China. The discovery comes as the country deals with anger over the dumping of over 16,000 pigs elsewhere in China. NBCNews.com's Dara Brown reports.
Scientists have established it is from an "avian reservoir" but still don't know the precise source. Chinese officials have dismissed suggestions of a connection with the large number of dead pigs and other animals found recently in rivers.
Many in China are understandably worried, with some deciding to avoid eating chicken, even though it poses no threat if properly cooked.
KFC’s parent company Yum reported on Wednesday that sales in its Chinese restaurants had dropped by 13 percent in March, saying “publicity associated with avian flu in China has had a significant, negative impact.”
Even Jiangsu Zoo, just north of Shanghai, reportedly stopped feeding chicken to animals such as lions and tigers and started giving them a traditional medicinal herb called ban lan gen.
Xie Li, an accountant in Shanghai, admitted she was “kind of nervous.”
“Now, we only eat vegetables," she said. "My daughter's school is measuring students' temperatures. We were told that we should eat less eggs or not touch eggs because they might have some excrement from chickens."
But others in the city of 23 million people were more sanguine.
A farm in China has admitted to dumping more than 6,000 pigs corpses into Shanghai's Huangpu River, according to China's official Xinhua news agency. NBCNews.com's Alex Witt reports.
Yan Zhanlin, a 40-year-old businessman, said he was “not scared, because there are not many cases, and the number of deaths is not high” and the virus had not yet spread between people.
“Today, I went to a train station, and I only saw few people wearing masks,” he said.
But even he said he had stopped eating “poultry, pork and other meat.”
Tang, a company manager in his late 20s, who declined to give his full name, was also relatively unconcerned.
“I do not fear [the virus] at all. It is just a kind of flu, and will pass quickly,” he said. Avoiding poultry was “not too bad, because it forces us to eat vegetables and fish, which are nutritious,” he added.
'Watching very carefully'Perhaps in a sign of the country's nervousness, People's Liberation Army Colonel Dai Xu claimed the U.S. was behind the outbreak, saying the U.S. had used "bio-psychological weapons" to cause the deadly 2003 Sars outbreak and the current flu one, The South China Morning Post reported.
Such allegations aside, this apparently local problem is being treated seriously on a global scale.
Samples of the virus – or non-infectious nucleic acid from it — are being sent to scientists in up to 140 national influenza centers recognized by the World Health Organization, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Work has already started in the U.S. to make a vaccine against the new strain -- just in case.
Scientist John McCauley, of the U.K.’s National Institute for Medical Research, received his consignment on Thursday.
“We’re watching very carefully the events there [in China] because we are aware although there’s no human-to-human transmission, these are unusual infections people have been getting from an avian reservoir,” he said.
“China will need to identify the source and hopefully be able to control the cross-species transmission,” he said. “We’re watching very carefully to see how it does.”
The outbreak of a new strain of bird flu has now infected at least 18 people, and killed six in China. NBC's Robert Bazell reports.
“In the meantime, the national influenza centers around the world are developing their ability to detect this newly emerging virus” and also working on vaccines, McCauley said.
Experts needed to find out how vaccines would perform “in case this virus becomes pandemic,” he said.
Coincidentally, John Oxford, a professor of virology and an expert on the 1918 flu pandemic, was in Shanghai about eight weeks ago -- roughly the same time that the elderly man first fell ill – for a meeting about hygiene, important in the fight against viruses such as flu.
He said the situation in China was “getting a little more worrying.”
“I don’t like the sound of it. Every day I open up the reports and find out someone else has died,” he said. “I just don’t like to see the figures going up day after day.”
“So far there’s no human-to-human transmission. What’s tomorrow going to bring, what’s the next day going to bring? You don’t know and I don’t know,” he added.
But Oxford, of the U.K's Queen Mary, University of London, stressed there was “no need for anyone to start flapping at the moment.”
“I don’t think we should start thinking of 1918 scenarios, definitely not,” he said.
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