Last Friday,
DemFromCT posted this diary,
Flu Stories: About Those Pigs.....
I went looking at Google News and discovered this is rapidly becoming a fairly major news story. Over 350 news stories have been posted about it during the last few days.
More below....
From the
BBC...
China alerts farmers to pig fever
Authorities in the Chinese province of Sichuan have begun a campaign to tell farmers about the dangers of a swine disease that has killed 32 people.
Officials have distributed posters warning farmers not to eat sick animals and to alert the authorities if their livestock becomes infected.
Meanwhile, the infection has spread to five more cities across the province.
There are now 163 human cases blamed on streptococcus suis, which was first found in people in the area in June.
The disease has occurred near cities including Ziyang and Neijiang, but it has now spread to Chengdu and four other Sichuan cities.
State media says the pig disease is under control, but the authorities have banned independent reporting on the outbreak.
The BBC's Nick Mackie in neighbouring Chongqing says foreign journalists found speaking to people are detained, and their notes and recordings erased; no official interviews are granted.
The head of the animal disease control unit of a neighbouring pig-producing county only learned of the crisis from the newspapers on 25 July.
The way the current crisis is being handled does little to inspire trust in the authorities' capabilities or willingness to be open with the facts, our correspondent says.
According to The Globe and Mail, the outbreak may be spreading.
China's pig-borne illness spreading
Saturday, July 30, 2005 Updated at 3:23 PM EDT
Associated Press
Beijing - A slaughterhouse worker contracted a pig-borne disease in southern China, a hospital official said Saturday, making him the first mainland case outside the province where 34 farmers have died since June from the illness.
Officials have reported 174 confirmed and suspected cases blamed on the bacteria streptococcus suis in Sichuan province in China's southwest, where farmers who handled or butchered infected pigs have been sickened in dozens of villages and towns, the official Xinhua News Agency reported late Saturday.
The latest case is a 43-year-old man in Chaozhou, a city in Guangdong province, which borders Hong Kong and is hundreds of kilometres southeast of Sichuan. He "recovered and was discharged," said an official from the Chaozhou Central Hospital, who would not give her name or any other details.
It wasn't clear whether Chinese health officials believed the case was linked to the Sichuan outbreak.
Guangdong officials provided information on the case to authorities in Hong Kong but didn't say whether they thought it was linked to Sichuan, said Eva Wong, a spokeswoman for the territory's Health Department.
So far there's no evidence of human to human transmission, just pig to human. But the symptoms seem pretty gruesome.
From the Taipei Times.
Health Minister Gao Qiang, who visited Sichuan this week, said on Thursday that the disease was "under control," but the World Health Organization (WHO) disagreed.
A team of 49 experts has been sent to affected areas to treat patients, the Beijing News said, but no effective medicine has been found -- one reason for the high death rate of one in five.
The epidemic has alarmed people as far away as Beijing.
Health inspectors there surveyed markets this week, checking for and destroying suspect pork. They also checked live pigs entering the capital for the bacteria and so far found no suspect swine, the Beijing News said.
Victims contracted the bacteria from slaughtering or processing infected pigs or handling infected pork, state media had quoted experts saying. Many had open wounds which allowed the bacteria to enter their blood stream.
Symptoms include high fever, vomiting and hemorrhaging, with many patients going into severe shock.
The WHO has said it was baffled because if the epidemic was caused by the bacteria, it would be the first time it had struck so many people at one time. Normally, only one or two cases of the rare disease are seen.
Not that I'm a medical expert by any means, but it sounds like this is an especially virulent mutation of streptococcus suis. This certainly bears watching.