China's latest bird flu death adds to worries for HK

HONG KONG, Mar 7 (Reuters) China's latest human death from bird flu is causing alarm in Hong Kong because it is the first in a Chinese urban area and the victim probably caught the virus from supposedly healthy poultry, the city's health minister said today.

The 32-year-old man fell ill after visiting a live poultry market several times to conduct research in southern Guangdong province, which borders Hong Kong. He died last Thursday, the ninth person to die of bird flu in China.

''He is an urban resident, he had no contact with farms or any poultry from the villages. His only exposure is the wet markets, which has poultry which are supposedly safe for consumption and safe for the public,'' Hong Kong's health minister York Chow said.

''And Guangdong province is one of the best (in China) in terms of supervising the control of avian flu. Since last year, it has immunised all its poultry through vaccination,'' he told a news conference.

Guangdong has not reported any outbreaks of the H5N1 avian flu virus in birds over the past year, and the man's death has heightened fears among experts that there might be poultry that are infected by the virus but which are not sickened by it.

Chow said Chinese authorities were investigating if the virus might have undergone any genetic changes and if there were problems with vaccines used in the country.

The man did not seek medical help until he was very sick and he died after spending just four days in hospital, Zhong Nanshan, director of the Guangzhou Institute of Respiratory Diseases, told reporters in Beijing on Tuesday.

The government had tested more than 100 people who had been in contact with the man, but none were found to be infected with H5N1, Guangdong Governor Huang Huahua told a news briefing in Beijing.

''Guangdong pays great attention to bird flu,'' Huang said, adding that Hong Kong did not have to worry about poultry imports from the province. ''Human cases still only happen by chance.'' The virus has killed 95 people in East Asia and the Middle East since late 2003. Most of the victims contracted the disease directly from sick poultry, but experts fear the virus could mutate and spread easily among people, sparking a pandemic.

The virus made its first known jump to humans in Hong Kong in 1997, killing six people.

The city banned live chicken imports, day-old chicks and pet birds from Guangdong after China confirmed late on Sunday that the man died of H5N1.

REUTERS SY RN1536