April 16, 2013

China health authorities puzzled over spread of H7N9 virus

China's poultry industry has suffered a loss of US$1.6 billion following the H7N9 human infections, said the country's state-run media.

Meanwhile, Chinese health authorities are puzzled over how the virus spread, but believed it may have passed from birds to humans, prompting mass culls in several cities.

Beijing has banned the live poultry trade.

Altogether, 60 people have been confirmed as infected and 13 have died in the two weeks since Chinese authorities revealed that they had found the strain in humans for the first time.

The number of cases spiked by 20 over the weekend and spread for the first time beyond Shanghai and three nearby provinces, with two cases reported just west in Henan and one in Beijing, hundreds of kilometres away.

Experts fear the prospect of such viruses mutating into a form easily transmissible between humans, which would have the potential to trigger a pandemic.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) has said that there is presently no evidence of human-to-human transmission of H7N9.

The United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organisation has said that H7N9 shows "affinity" to humans while causing "very mild or no disease" in infected poultry, making it more difficult to find the source of transmission.