【新闻】Official Chinese bird flu deaths could be 'tip of iceberg'

nmet

A respected Japanese scientist, who works with the World Health Organization, has told New Scientist he fears that China’s official tally of laboratory-confirmed human bird flu fatalities – just three – is only the tip of the iceberg.

Masato Tashiro, head of virology at Tokyo’s National Institute of Infectious Disease – a WHO-collaborating centre for bird flu – showed a slide at a meeting of virologists in Marburg, Germany, on 19 November listing “several dozen” outbreaks in people, 300 deaths, 3000 people placed in isolation, and seven human-to-human transmissions. The meeting was reported in the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

Tashiro has now told New Scientist that the figures were examples of the “unauthorised information” circulating in China, where he was recently helping investigate the outbreak in Hunan for the WHO.

Earlier reports suggested that Tashiro believed 300 to be the true death toll from bird flu in China. “I do not know whether the numbers were based on any evidence,” he says.

But the message is that “we do not know how many cases actually occurred in China”, due to poor disease surveillance. “If surveillance is done more extensively, more cases may be detected.” He says the international community should assist China with monitoring. He describes the situation as an "iceberg phenomenon" – with most cases unreported.
Severe restrictions

China has reported only three confirmed cases of H5N1 in people: a boy in Hunan province who recovered, and two women in Anhui province who died, the latest of which was announced on Thursday. There was another probable case in Hunan.

The potential problem of underreporting may not only be technical. There are also claims that Chinese medical personnel have been arrested for trying to report cases. China enforced severe restrictions on the investigation and reporting of suspected cases of bird flu in June 2005.

But the WHO says it does not believe China is deliberately hiding cases as it did during the SARS outbreak in 2003. "There are many countries where surveillance is weak and needs to be strengthened, I think that's true in certain parts of China as well," says Roy Wadia, a WHO spokesman based in Beijing. "We're getting lots of information in a timely way about the outbreaks and we're asked to be part of the ongoing investigations. I think that speaks for itself."

Virologists consider the relative absence of human cases of bird flu in China unusual, given its widespread infection in birds. China has reported 22 poultry outbreaks in 10 provinces all across the country since mid-October 2005, the latest being on Friday.

The WHO told the official Chinese news agency Xinhua last week that the virus that caused the outbreak in Hunan is the same as the H5N1 flu in Vietnam and Thailand, where it has caused 113 confirmed human cases and 55 deaths so far.

Source: http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn8372

T22-T22

真正死的人估计远远不止3个那么简单。。。

polobo

请注意这是一个小日本科学家讲的话.

aris

请注意它工作在WHO

justkaka

国外网站内容如果是英文的还是比较客观的，如果用中文那就是另有他求了。

skyinsky

再次注意这是一个小日本科学家讲的话.
同时也注意文中who新闻发言人的话。
情况不太乐观，但也没有日本人说的那么严重。

nmet

科学无国界。

大家想好对小日本的言论总是带有个人色彩在里面。 我相信作科学的人讲出的话是客观的，有依据的。