Chinese cities on alert to block diseased pork

BEIJING - Beijing and several other cities set up checkpoints on Friday to block diseased pork linked to the deaths of 31 people in China as authorities ordered a halt to the slaughter of infected pigs in Sichuan province.

A veterinary inspection official said screening was tightened on highways leading into Beijing from surrounding Hebei province to prevent a health threat to nearly 15 million people.

"The strict measures guarantee that meat from dead or diseased pigs cannot enter Beijing through normal channels," Beijing Television said on its website.

Authorities said victims in southwestern Sichuan were suffering from infections of Streptococcus suis bacteria, contracted from slaughtering, handling or eating infected pigs.

Four deaths and 21 infections were reported in the previous 24 hours, the official Xinhua news agency said late on Thursday.

Since reports of the outbreak surfaced last week, more than 100 people have been taken ill, 27 of whom are in critical condition. The China Daily says the outbreak was discovered on June 24.

Most of the infections have been reported in the cities of Ziyang and Neijiang, but six victims were found in six other towns in Sichuan, state media said.

China's Health Minister Gao Qiang, on an inspection tour of the stricken communities in Sichuan province, said the outbreak had been brought under "preliminary control" but more needed to be done to control its spread.

"Prevention workers and local officials need to strengthen inspection work and prevent the slaughter, sale or transport of sick or dead pigs," Gao said in a statement.

The outbreak comes as world health officials are concerned about a bird flu virus that has killed more than 50 people in Asia since late 2003.

Authorities sacked two officials in Ziyang for failing to inform local people about the disease, an oversight that led to the infection of at least one farmer from contact with diseased meat, an unconfirmed report said on Friday.

A local health inspector was also sacked for dereliction of duty.

"He left all the inspection work to the villagers themselves and just sat in his car," the report said.

Officials from Sichuan and Beijing have been tight-lipped about the outbreak. A source from Ziyang's disease prevention and control centre said her office had been instructed to give out information only by daily official news releases.

More than 50,000 health workers and officials had been sent to the Ziyang area to inspect and register every pig and set up 39 temporary roadside quarantine stations to stop dead pigs from going to market, the China Daily said.

Sichuan, China's top pork-producing province, was forced to suspend all exports of chilled and frozen pork from Ziyang and Neijiang to Hong Kong this week.

Pork is China's favourite meat and the country consumes more of it than anywhere else in the world.

Concern about the disease grew in Hong Kong on Friday after the city government said a local man had contracted the disease.

The 26-year-old interior decorator had not visited mainland China recently and had had no contact with pigs or raw pork, the government said. He spent a week in hospital before being discharged.

Nine other people in Hong Kong contracted the same disease since May 2004, city officials said.

"We are not sure whether there is a rising trend or not but we are watching very closely the number of cases," said Dr Regina Ching, acting controller of the Centre for Health Protection.

She said the situation in Hong Kong was "fairly stable" and the hot weather may have led to the recent increase in cases.

"We have received about two cases in three months, and we have noticed during the summer months there is a slight tendency to have more cases," Ching said.

Hong Kong imports most of its food from the mainland but also has some local pig farms.

Streptococcus suis, swine flu in layman's terms, is endemic in swine in most pig-rearing countries in the world but human infections are rare. Although China's state media have said no human-to-human infections had been found in Sichuan, the death toll is considered unusually high.

Swine flu is not known to have ever been passed between humans, but scientists fear it could mutate into a bug that could easily pass among people, unleashing a deadly epidemic.

- REUTERS