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BEIJING : Bird flu re-emerged as a threat in Asia on Tuesday when China reported the disease killed a woman in Beijing and neighbouring Vietnam said a girl had contracted the virus.
The cases are the first involving humans in the two countries in nearly a year, and mark a reappearance of the H5N1 virus as Asia moves into the cold winter months that typically favour the spread of the virus.
The case in the Chinese capital saw a 19-year-old woman, Huang Yanqing, die on Monday after she fell ill on December 24, the Beijing Health Bureau said.
Huang apparently contracted the disease after she cleaned the internal organs of some ducks she had bought in neighbouring Hebei province, China's official Xinhua news agency reported.
Contact with infected poultry or surfaces and objects contaminated by their faeces, is considered the main route of human infection, according to the World Health Organisation.
Xinhua reported that 116 people had been in close contact with Huang and that one, a nurse, had contracted a fever but recovered.
Huang's death was the first in China since a woman died of the disease in southern China last February.
However, the World Health Organisation (WHO) said there was no immediate cause for alarm.
"We are concerned by any case of human H5N1 infection. However, this single case, which appears to have occurred during the slaughtering and preparation of poultry, does not change our risk assessment," a statement by the WHO's China office said.
In Vietnam, authorities reported an eight-year-old girl had tested positive for H5N1 in the north of the country where the virus struck poultry flocks recently amid cold and wet weather.
The girl in Thanh Hoa province fell ill with serious pneumonia on December 27 after eating poultry and was admitted to a provincial hospital on January 2, local officials said, although they added she was recovering well.
Nguyen Huu Dinh, head of the provincial animal health department, said infected poultry had been detected in the area and that all had been killed, without specifying how many.
The virulent H5N1 strain killed five people in Vietnam in early 2008, but no new human deaths had been reported since March.
It killed three people in China in the first two months of last year.
H5N1 bird flu has killed 247 people since it re-appeared in Asia in 2003, according to the latest tally on the WHO's website, which did not include Monday's fatality in China.
Scientists fear the virus could eventually mutate into a form more easily transmissible between humans, triggering a global pandemic.
China is regarded as a potential bird flu flashpoint because it has the world's largest number of poultry, with tens of millions of chickens reared in densely populated areas.
A total of 21 people in China has now died of the disease since 2003. Another 10 contracted it but survived.
There had been no reported outbreaks in Beijing poultry recently but the disease did surface in an eastern Chinese province last month.
More than 370,000 chickens were culled in Jiangsu province in December after infected chickens were found there.
In areas of northern Vietnam that border China, authorities have reported bird flu in three poultry flocks since late December, leading to the slaughter of hundreds of ducks and thousands of chickens.
Vietnam has issued a nationwide bird flu alert, urging stepped-up detection and epidemic control measures.
Winter is considered a higher-risk period for bird flu due to cooler weather and higher poultry consumption during New Year holidays.
"This is the high-risk season because it's cold and the Tet lunar New Year is coming up in Vietnam," said Jeff Gilbert, senior technical bird flu advisor in Vietnam for the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation.
"China has the (Lunar) New Year coming up, so the situation would be the same." - AFP/ms
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