china
revere | November 1, 2006The Chinese news agency Xinhua reported last week that scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology found H5N1 in the feces of sparrow, non-migratory urban birds two years ago (via Reuters). The brief news report only says the discovery followed an outbreak among poultry in nearby Henan province. It's not clear what took so long to report this or whether the H5N1 strain in sparrows differs from that in poultry.
Is this good or bad for public health?
It's hard to think of ways it could be good for public health to have another endemic source of a virus potentially capable of infecting humans…
revere | August 10, 2006China now admits what everyone knows already knows. It had a death from H5N1 in November of 2003, a full year before its "official" first case (The Guardian). In fact everyone also knows that there was H5N1 in February of that year when the disease was diagnosed in Hong Kong in a family just returned from a visit to Fujian province. That occurred at the outset of China's now infamous SARS cover-up. As interesting, the Chinese explanation for why the case not been reported earlier, was it had been misdiagnosed as a SARS case. This may in fact be what happened but it raises another question:…
revere | July 15, 2006The frozen chicken from China story has a follow-up. You may remember that a warehouse full of the chicken was found in Detroit although import is banned to the US because it came from an area where there is bird flu. An unstated amount of the meat was already in commerce in restaurants and retail stores. If you live in Detroit, you probably haven't received a recall notice, however:
Health officials have begun contacting restaurants and markets supplied by a Troy warehouse suspected of importing Chinese poultry, but there was no plan Thursday for alerting the retail customers of Asia Food…
revere | July 5, 2006The irony is too delicious. Boingboing reports that Yahoo China will be sued by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industries for enabling the pirating of music by disclosing to its users where to get it on the internet. In effect they are being held responsible for the copyright status of everything they point to:
"Yahoo China has been blatantly infringing our members' rights. We have started the process and as far as we're concerned we're on the track to litigation," said John Kennedy, chairman and chief executive of the music industry trade group the International Federation…
revere | July 3, 2006The suspicion that China is not as open about disease outbreaks within its borders was not helped last week when a Research Correspondence in The New England Journal of Medicine from eight Chinese scientists reporting an early case of H5N1 infection was the subject of mysterious emails to the journal's editors asking it be withdrawn (see here and here). The source of the emails has not been established and the authors say they stand by their results. The whole affair was (or should be) an embarrassment to the Chinese authorities.
The major problem in China, however, has not been the Health…
revere | June 27, 2006Better not have a "sudden event" in China. Or rather, you can have one, but don't tell anyone about it.
What's a "sudden event"?
While state media did not offer a definition of "sudden events," in the past they have included natural disasters, major accidents, public health or social safety incidents. (New York Times; h/t Easy Hiker)
What will happen to you if you tell?
Chinese media outlets will be fined up to $12,500 each time they report on "sudden events" without prior authorization from government officials, according to a draft law under review by the Communist Party-controlled…