BEIJING - CHINESE authorities said on Wednesday they had stepped up monitoring at poultry markets and closed down some sellers of live birds after a woman in Beijing died of bird flu.
The death on Monday of the 19-year-old was China's first in nearly a year, highlighting the heightened risk of the deadly and highly contagious H5N1 strain of the virus during the winter, when it is most virulent.
Authorities in neighbouring Hebei province disinfected the market where the woman, Huang Yanqing, on December 19 reportedly bought nine ducks suspected of being the source of her infection, Xinhua news agency reported.
Four live poultry sellers were shut down, it added.
Authorities in Sanhe city, where the market was located, have also examined 15 people involved in the poultry trade, inspected farms and checked on all local cases of fever, the city government said in a statement.
'So far, nothing unusual has been found,' said the statement faxed to AFP.
Huang, who lived in Beijing, apparently contracted the disease on December 24 after cleaning the internal organs of the ducks.
Contact with infected poultry or surfaces and objects contaminated by their faeces is considered the main route of human infection, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO).
Beijing also ordered stepped-up monitoring of the live poultry trade in the Chinese capital, with experts launching inspections at slaughterhouses and poultry farms, a city government statement said.
Xinhua reported earlier that 116 people - 14 of Huang's relatives and 102 medical workers - had come in contact with her and that one, a nurse, had contracted a fever but subsequently recovered.
Huang's death was the first in China since a woman died of the disease in the south of the country last February.
The WHO said on Tuesday there was no immediate fear of a wider outbreak.
Authorities in Vietnam announced Tuesday an eight-year-old girl had tested positive for H5N1 in the north of the country.
H5N1 bird flu has now killed 248 people since it re-appeared in Asia in 2003, according to the WHO. Twenty-one of the deaths have been in China.
Scientists fear the virus could eventually mutate into a form more easily transmissible between humans, triggering a global pandemic. -- AFP
