Hong Kong hospitals were on the lookout yesterday for a mystery illness that has killed nine people in China's southern Sichuan province.
Twenty people were hospitalized with the unknown disease from June 24 to July 21 in the city of Ziyang, the Hong Kong government said Saturday, citing information from Sichuan officials.
Nine died, one was discharged and 10 are still in the hospital, including six in critical condition, according to the Hong Kong government. World Health Organization spokesman Bob Dietz said the cases may be linked to farmers who have slaughtered either pigs or sheep. He said the Chinese government has dispatched a team to investigate.
PHOTO: AP
The Chinese news Web site Sina.com reported Saturday the people infected suffered from symptoms like fever, lack of energy, vomiting, bleeding from blood vessels beneath the skin, and shock. Dietz said the disease doesn't appear to be spreading.
Hong Kong's Hospital Authority has asked its hospitals to notify health authorities of any patients with similar symptoms, spokesman Raymond Lo said yesterday.
Hong Kong is wary of diseases spreading here from China since severe acute respiratory syndrome was brought to the territory by a Mainlander in 2003.
The disease eventually killed 299 people in Hong Kong.
pigs destroyed
Meanwhile, Indonesia became the first known country yesterday to destroy pigs in its effort to contain the rapid spread of bird flu, which has killed at least 57 people across Asia and devastated poultry stocks.
Plans to slaughter 200 swine, however, were sharply reduced as authorities wrangled over the best way to battle the deadly disease.
Eighteen pigs that tested positive for the H5N1 strain of the virus were killed on two farms on the outskirts of Jakarta. After being injected with drugs that rendered them unconscious, they were loaded onto trucks, taken to a field and thrown into a fire.
Healthy animals escaped the culls, despite Agriculture Minister Anton Apriyantono's earlier pledge to kill all birds and pigs on farms hit by the deadly avian influenza.
"If we kill all, healthy and sick, it guarantees nothing because the virus can be spread in the air," he told reporters at an event that appeared to be orchestrated largely for television cameras. "We only want to kill those that are infected."
The farms targeted yesterday were 15km from the home of three family members who earlier this month became the first people in Indonesia to die of bird flu, a 38-year-old foreign ministry worker and his two daughters, 9 and 1.
Authorities still do not know where they contracted the disease -- they had no known contact with birds -- but decided to start with the closest point of infection, Tangerang.
`a mixing bowl'
Apriyantono said farmers who lost pigs to the government's culling campaign would be compensated, most of them with cows.
In May, an Indonesian scientist said he found H5N1 in blood samples taken from pigs, which are genetically similar to people and often carry the human influenza virus, findings that were somewhat controversial.
Experts worry that pigs infected with both bird flu and its human equivalent could act as a "mixing bowl," resulting in a more dangerous, mutant virus that might spread to people more easily -- and from person to person.
Preparing for the worst, Indonesia's health ministry warned last week that 44 hospitals nationwide had been put on alert to receive and treat bird flu patients.
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