China swine flu outbreak fails to worry residents
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Near the epicentre of China’s worst outbreak of swine flu in years, Lao Luo is too busy stuffing his face with pork dumplings to care.
“It’s all under control,” Luo said between mouthfuls as fat dribbled off his chin at a roadside diner in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan, China’s second-most populous province.
That a region famous for its fiery cuisine, bamboo forests and lovable pandas is now host to a bacterial scourge that has killed 37 and infected 205 is dismissed with a shrug and another mouthful.
“All the pork supplied to Chengdu comes from big, industrial farms anyway, not these little ones in the countryside where peasants slaughter pigs and sell them themselves,” he argued, dragging on a cigarette.
“We’re not worried at all,” Luo added, dipping another dumpling into chili sauce.
A two-hour bus ride away lies ground zero of the latest alarming outbreak, believed to have infected thousands of hogs and hundreds of farmers, butchers and other victims who have come into contact with their infected flesh.
It is China’s biggest outbreak of disease since the deadly flu-like SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) virus emerged in southern China in late 2002 and went on to kill about 800 people around the world.
At the centre of the furore is a particularly deadly strain of Streptococcus suis bacteria, which can enter the body through cuts and wounds and orifices and cause internal bleeding, blood poisoning and meningitis. It can be treated with antibiotics.
Medical experts say the Chinese strain has an unusually high mortality rate of 20 percent.
Chinese health officials - criticised for being slow to alert the world to the threat - have since come down hard, threatening to jail officials who covered up the widening outbreak, educating Sichuanese peasants on hygiene, and urging physicians to join the fight against the disease.
They might be wasting their breath. Every table at the hot, grimy Chengdu restaurant was occupied on Tuesday, as staff worked feverishly stuffing raw pork into soft dumpling skins that ended up on the plates of a seemingly endless stream of customers.
“It’s all going to be over very soon,” said farmer Hu, selling green plums by a Chengdu bridge under a rainy sky. “There’s no risk if you cook the meat at a high temperature.”
DEVIL-MAY-CARE
This devil-may-care attitude has health experts concerned. After all, pork is China’s favourite meat and the country produces and consumes more of it than anywhere else in the world.
Impoverished farmers, having bought piglets, inoculations and feed, were refusing to shell out even more money on burying sick pigs with disinfectant. Instead, they slaughtered them and ate the meat themselves, state media said.
Swine flu cases have also been reported in the southern province of Guangdong and neighbouring Hong Kong.
“Swine flu is a problem whenever you have hot weather,” said butcher Li in Chengdu, wiping bloody pork scraps off his cleaver. “So I wasn’t too worried about this outbreak when I first heard.”
Health officials insist the outbreak is under control. They say the spike in the toll represents previously undiagnosed cases, not new cases that would mean the disease was spreading.
Nonetheless, draconian measures were in place across China to prevent infection. Outside the capital, Beijing, authorities had blocked inward shipments of about 4,000 tonnes of pork and pork products from Sichuan, the Beijing News said.
Other Chinese cities have also set up tight perimeter checks to block pork from Sichuan, home to almost 90 million people - about the population of the Philippines.
The China Daily said on Wednesday that Guangzhou, capital of Guangdong, had impounded more than 200 tonnes of pork from affected areas in three days, but that about 8.5 tonnes of pork from those areas were known to have reached city markets in June.
No one was known to have been taken ill from eating tainted pork in Guangdong, it said.
In Shanghai, China’s richest and most cosmopolitan city, health authorities have issued a notice requiring strict monitoring and controls at slaughterhouses, and asked doctors to immediately alert them of any suspected outbreaks.
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