China Announces 4 New Bird Flu Cases

China Announces 4 New Bird Flu Cases

SHANGHAI — China said Tuesday that four more people in the coastal part of the country have been infected with a new strain of bird flu, which is believed to have killed two Shanghai residents last month and left one person in critical condition. World Twitter Logo. Connect With Us on Twitter Follow @nytimesworld for international breaking news and headlines. Twitter List: Reporters and Editors The four new patients, ages 32 to 83, are hospitalized and critically ill, according to a government Web site that cited the authorities in the city of Nanjing, in Jiangsu Province northwest of Shanghai. The officials said laboratory tests had confirmed that all four were infected with a strain of bird flu identified as H7N9, which was not found in humans before the Shanghai cases. The cases are troubling because there is no vaccine for the H7N9 strain and because another strain of bird flu, identified as H5N1, killed hundreds of people in Asia beginning in 2003, and led to the deaths of tens of millions of birds. The World Health Organization says that most H5N1 cases had involved contact with infected poultry. One of the four people on Nanjing infected with the H7N9 virus is a poultry butcher. Health authorities had previously reported that H7N9 cannot easily be contracted by humans, and officials said that no one who had contact with the four infected patients had developed symptoms. The agency said it was told about the three Shanghai cases by Chinese health authorities on Sunday. The two who died there were men aged 27 and 87; the critically ill patient there is a 35-year-old woman from neighboring Anhui Province. In Nanjing, the authorities said late Tuesday that all four infected individuals there were from Jiangsu Province: one each from the cities of Nanjing, Suzhou and Wuxi and one from Shuyang County. One is male and three are female, they said; two of them began to develop flu symptoms on March 19. The government said in Shanghai on Monday that no link was found between the bird flu virus and the 15,000 dead pigs that have been found recently in the Huangpu River. City officials have not yet explained how or why the pig carcasses wound up in the river, though the government said one pig farmer had admitted dumping some dead pigs there. 

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