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Not through self-proclaim magic traditional medicine, but through good old proven vaccination.
From today's Wall Stree Journal:
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China presses avian-flu plan
Two new outbreaks spur push to vaccinate poultry; Beijing lab opens to WHO
By NICHOLAS ZAMISKA and JASON DEAN
Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
November 15, 2005 2:02 p.m.
As China grapples with two new outbreaks of avian influenza among poultry, a top Chinese agriculture official said the country would press forward with an ambitious national plan to vaccinate its vast numbers of poultry.
After only a few scattered outbreaks earlier this year, China has reported nearly a dozen outbreaks of the deadly H5N1 strain of the virus in the past month, prompting fears that the virus may be more widespread than previously thought -- as well as raising the possibility that human cases may be going undetected or unreported.
Some international health officials at first balked at the efforts of China and other countries to vaccinate poultry en masse, fearing in part that the disease could spread undetected in immunized flocks. Now, animal-health organizations recommend vaccines, if used properly, as a way to control the disease. Meanwhile, Vietnam has launched an unprecedented campaign to purge its two largest cities of poultry to slow the spread of the disease.
The latest outbreaks in China have infected more than 6,000 birds in the western province of Xinjiang, said a spokesman for the World Health Organization in Beijing.
PREVENTING A PANDEMIC
?See complete coverage of avian flu, including an interactive graphic on the science of the virus and a look back at major flu epidemics.
?Plus, see an FAQ on avian flu, and an interactive global map tracking outbreaks by country and region.
A small team of WHO officials was in the capital of Hunan province Tuesday, the site of a recent outbreak, pressing the Chinese government for more information on whether active efforts are being made to identify bird-flu cases in humans.
Julie Hall, a communicable disease expert with WHO in Beijing, said in a telephone interview from Hunan province that one of the questions the team is asking is whether, as a precautionary measure, the government has been testing humans who may have been exposed to infected birds, even though those people show no symptoms of the disease. The Ministry of Health has declined to answer written questions on the issue.
Meanwhile, in what appears to be a first, China has allowed a handful of outside scientists from WHO to work alongside Chinese researchers at one of the country's official laboratories in Beijing. The group currently is testing samples from three possible cases of unidentified human cases of pneumonia that could have been bird flu.
The Chinese government repeatedly has denied talk of human cases, but the possibility has been left open recently that one or more of these three cases may prove to have been caused by bird flu.
Separately, Jia Youling, China's chief veterinarian at the Ministry of Agriculture, wrote in a question-and-answer session on the Web site of the People's Daily newspaper that China was pursuing an ambitious national vaccination program, and that the government plans to pay for all of it. "Currently, the country is vaccinating poultry on a nationwide basis," he wrote.
That could be a massive task because of the size of China's poultry population, estimated at more than 14 billion. The People's Daily Web site, citing the Ministry of Agriculture, said China can produce 100 million doses of vaccine for birds a day. Because demand is increasing, China is stepping up production and expanding capacity.
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发表于 2005-11-17 00:21
