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A 21-year-old female farmer was confirmed infected with bird flu in central China’s Hunan Province, said the provincial health bureau on Saturday.
The farmer, surnamed Shu, fell ill on January 23 in Xupu County of the province and was hospitalized at the county’s People’s Hospital on January 26, said a statement from the bureau.

Shu was transferred to a hospital in Changsha, capital of the province, on Thursday. So far she has been in a stable condition and become better.

According to the test result on Friday from the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, the farmer tested positive for the H5N1 strain of avian influenza.

An investigation found that Shu had contact with fowls that died of disease before becoming sick.

Hunan has launched an emergency response against the virus. Those who had close contact with the patient are under medical observation, but none of them has been found ill so far.

The Health Ministry said it had reported the case to the World Health Organization (WHO) and informed the health authorities of China’s Hong Kong and Macao special administrative regions and relevant countries.

According to the health department of Hunan province, a patient from Guizhou province was diagnosed to be infected with bird flu in Huaihua of Hunan on January 19, who died a day later.

China reported five deaths from bird flu this year. The rest were a 19-year-old woman in Beijing on January 5, a 27-year-old woman in Shandong on January 17, a 31-year-old woman in Xinjiang on January 23 and an 18-year-old man in Guangxi on January 26.

According to statistics from WHO, China has reported an accumulated number of bird flu cases of 38 since 2003, with 25 deaths. The year 2006 saw the peak of bird flu reports by China, with 13 cases and 8 deaths.

Source: China Daily

An article in Epoch Times mirrors what I’ve been thinking from the wide geographic location of the “sporadic and geographically isolated” bird flu victims:

In December 2008, H5N1 was discovered in chickens in Hong Kong. The Hong Kong government killed tens of thousands of birds, but avoided revealing the sources of the chickens under pressure from Chinese authorities. It is widely known that Hong Kong’s live poultry is provided by mainland Chinese suppliers. These birds could not have been infected with the virus after arriving in Hong Kong. This Hong Kong discovery may indicate a massive bird flu breakout in China, one which has been intentionally hidden by the government controlled media.

Unsurprisingly, soon after the Hong Kong breakout, news soon spread throughout the internet that millions of chickens died of H5N1 bird flu in south-eastern China’s Jiangsu Province in November 2008. These reports offered evidence that these dead chickens were simply bleached with hydrogen peroxide and sold to Shanghai, Shandong and Henan provinces.

As authorities continue to conceal this critical information, unscrupulous businesses in China take advantage of the environment, putting the public in unnecessary danger of contacting disease from contaminated sources. Chinese media claimed that a 19-year-girl from Beijing who died on January 5, 2009 was the first victim of the new wave of H5N1 breakout. But was she really the first?

The reported human bird flu cases appeared in different areas of China, which may mean H5N1 has spread to a vast range of areas throughout the country through unregulated channels as diseased chickens go to market. One need only consider the Chinese communist regime recent behavior in covering up SARS to realize that the official government reports might not tell the whole story. It casts serious doubt on the credibility of the claim that there are only four cases of humans contracting the virus. Might they be just the tip of an iceberg?

According to China, there haven’t been any outbreaks of bird flu in poultry. My question was, who is lying? Local officials that are covering up a potential financial disaster due to widespread poultry disease? The health ministry that does not want people (foreigners) to know how serious this outbreak could be? How many people are dying without having been checked for the presence of H5N1?

From AFP:

JAKARTA (AFP) — A 21-year-old Indonesian woman has died of suspected bird flu, a doctor said Wednesday.

The woman died on Saturday in Doctor Soetomo Hospital in Surabaya, East Java, after showing bird flu symptoms, said Palilingan, a doctor in the hospital’s avian flu team who like many Indonesians goes by only one name.

“She had breathing difficulties, high fever and lost consciousness,” Palilingan told AFP.

He said the presence of the deadly H5N1 strain of the virus would have to be confirmed after testing of tissue samples.

Two positive results are needed before Indonesian authorities confirm a human bird flu infection.

A health ministry spokeswoman said the ministry had sent experts to check on the condition of poultry in the woman’s village in Tulungagung district, East Java.

BEIJING (Reuters) – China’s Ministry of Health said a young man had died of the H5N1 strain of bird flu Monday, the fifth reported death this month.

The 18-year-old was admitted to hospital on Jan 24 in Yulin, in the southwestern Guangxi, bordering Vietnam, after falling ill and entering a local clinic in the town of Beiliu three days earlier.

He had contact with dead poultry before falling ill, the Ministry said, adding that people who have been in contact with him have not shown any signs of the illness.

In December, the Ministry of Agriculture reported positive results during routine tests for bird flu among poultry in Jiangsu province, but has not reported an outbreak among poultry for months.

The H5N1 flu remains largely a virus among birds, but experts fear it could mutate into a form that is easily transmitted by humans and spark a pandemic that could kill millions worldwide.

Since the H5N1 virus resurfaced in Asia in 2003 it has infected 399 people worldwide and killed 252 of them, according to World Health Organization data Saturday.

The bird flu deaths in China in January have been scattered across the country in areas where there has been no known outbreak of bird flu among poultry, raising concerns among scientists that the virus may be present but masked by widespread vaccination.

Another victim, a 29-year old man in Guizhou province, is in stable condition, the Xinhua news agency said Monday, while a two-year old girl in a Shanxi hospital is now recovering.

BEIJING (Reuters) – A man in the southwestern Chinese province of Guizhou has been infected with bird flu and is in a critical condition in hospital, the Health Ministry said on Sunday.

It is the sixth human case of bird flu to be reported in China this year. The Chinese Health Ministry said on its website (www.moh.gov.cn) the latest victim was a 29-year-old man surnamed Zhou who fell sick on January 15.

In recent weeks four people have died of bird flu in China.

Per the AP, the bird flu incidents are distributed as follows:

A woman in China’s far west died Friday from bird flu, the fourth death this month, just as millions of people are on the move to return home for the traditional Lunar New Year.

A woman in eastern China, a teenage boy in southwest China and a woman in Beijing also have died from the disease this month.

Add to that distribution list the toddler from Shanxi province, now recovering, and her mother, who died before the toddler was taken ill from “pneumonia” but who was not tested. I believe that this woman also died from H5N1.