China media urge eating poultry despite bird flu
Worldwide, Daily news | ankakh | April 15, 2013 17:04China’s poultry industry lost 10 billion yuan ($1.6 billion) in the week after the H7N9 bird flu virus began infecting humans, state-run media said on Monday as they sought to discourage panic.
Altogether 60 people have been confirmed as infected and 13 have died in the two weeks since Chinese authorities said they found the strain in humans for the first time.
“The public should somewhat restrain their anxieties to avoid this becoming a disaster for the whole poultry industry,” the Global Times said in an editorial, adding that not eating poultry was “unfair to farmers”.
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 Organization (WHO) has said there is as yet no evidence of human-to-human transmission of H7N9.
Health authorities in China say they do not know exactly how the virus is spreading, but it is believed to be crossing from birds to humans, prompting mass culls in several cities. Beijing has banned the live poultry trade.
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