China sets blueprint for fighting flu pandemic
China announced colour-coded emergency measures on Wednesday to avert or handle an influenza pandemic amid fears that a deadly strain of bird flu could mutate and infect millions of people around the world.
Millions of Chinese catch flu every winter, while avian influenza, including the deadly H5N1 strain that has killed 65 people in Asia, is believed endemic among the country’s bird population.
The Health Ministry, widely criticized three years ago for its handling of a deadly SARS outbreak, is to set up a national anti-influenza leadership group and stockpile vaccines. It has urged regional governments to coordinate monitoring efforts.
Four levels of alert—blue, yellow, orange and red—will indicate the seriousness of the outbreak.
“The most serious level, red, will be announced in case of a consistent and rapid spread of new sub-type flu virus among the people, or if the World Health Organization announces the outbreak of a flu pandemic,” the ministry said.
Experts say southern China could be ground zero for such a pandemic because many there live in close proximity to livestock, allowing animal diseases such as bird flu to jump to humans.
“If a person is infected with a human influenza and also contracts avian influenza ... the two kinds of influenza could mix and re-assort themselves into a more dangerous strain that could cause easy human-to-human transmission,” Aphaluck Bhatiasevi, a WHO spokeswoman in Beijing, told Reuters.
“And that would be the pandemic.”
China’s plan focused on preventing and handling infections of human influenza and did not specifically mention bird flu, but it was also geared to handle such an outbreak, Bhatiasevi said.
The government would subsidize and encourage research and production of flu vaccines and medicines while beefing up national stockpiles, the ministry scheme says.
“We have to admit our vaccine production capabilities and medicine stores are weak points,” National Influenza Center director Shu Yuelong was quoted as saying.
The Outlook Weekly magazine quoted Shu as adding that China, with a population of 1.3 billion, had only nine flu vaccine makers with total annual production capacity of 10 million doses.
In the plan, the Health Ministry also pledges to compile weekly reports analyzing information from the nationwide influenza monitoring system and to share data with the WHO.
“China has learned from the SARS experience and has been more open and more willing to respond to disease outbreaks,” Bhatiasevi said.
Beijing was widely criticized for initially trying to cover up the outbreak of SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome), which emerged in southern China and spread globally in 2003, infecting 8,000 people and killing 800.
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