Pandemic Possible if Bird Flu In China Is Linked With Massive Pig Deaths

As news came in Tuesday of four more infections in China from the H7N9 bird flu, one view of the situation, espoused by Foreign Policy's global health expert, Laurie Garrett, may be coming into sharper focus: that "this could be how pandemics begin."

In her piece on Monday, April 1, Garrett draws a link between hundreds of ducks and thousands of pigs found floating down rivers in China in March and the human casualties from the new strain of bird flu called H7N9.

Back in mid-March, a weird story broke from China about Shanghai having to suddenly contend with dead pigs floating down the Huangpu River. While the numbers of floating, bloated swine rose to the thousands a few days later, the general reaction seemed to be to shrug it off. China, after all, has been dealing with terrible pollution in recent months: for example, its air quality has literally been "off the charts" bad.

Chinese authorities also downplayed the possibility of disease. For example, when more than 1,000 ducks were found rotting in a river outside of Shanghai days after the floating pigs were reported, the director of the Sichuan Animal Health Inspection Bureau stated to ABCNews, "There is no sign an epidemic broke out. We believe the large amounts of ducks died because the weather suddenly got too warm." But Garrett notes that in late March, dead pigs and ducks were also found in the Xiang river, hundreds of miles west of Shanghai and in the Sichuan River, hundreds of miles north - the problem was more widespread.

By the last day of March, Easter Sunday, China's health authorities announced that two men who had died in early March, one of whom had been a butcher or meat processor of some kind, had been infected with H7N9 bird flu. The H7N9 had never been known to infect humans before that, but as the news broke, Chinese authorities and the WHO asserted that there was no evidence of human-to-human transmission.

Garrett comments that bird flu viruses have mutated into swine flu many times, when birds (such as domesticated ducks) and pigs share food and water. And after the flu adapts to pig cells, it's "often possible for the virus to take human-transmissible form," which is what happened in 2009 during the swine flu scare.

For more detail, please read Garrett's piece at Foreign Policy, which includes a timeline of events. That timeline can now include:

April 2 - Four more confirmed infected with H7N9 bird flu. Only one worked closely with birds.

Source: Is This a Pandemic Being Born?