China Confirms 2nd Bird Flu Death

Farmer Died Of H5N1 Virus; Ill Teacher Does Not Have Bird Flu

(CBS/AP)  A World Health Organization official on Wednesday said blood tests on the Chinese schoolteacher who fell sick in the same area showed that he didn't have bird flu.

"Based on an extensive range of blood tests, he's been excluded as a case of H5N1," said Dr. Julie Hall, an infectious diseases specialist for WHO's Beijing office.

The government said the teacher, 36, became ill after handling raw chicken. He lived in rural Wangtan village in Hunan, which suffered one of China's first bird flu outbreaks in the recent series of cases.

Hall said the children in Hunan were probably infected by handling sick chickens — which lived on the first floor of the family's rural home — and not because they ate infected meat, as had been reported by Chinese state media.

The WHO announcement came after China reported three new bird flu outbreaks in poultry.

Such outbreaks have been reported almost daily despite a nationwide effort to vaccinate billions of poultry.

The latest were in the northwestern cities of Urumqi and Yinchuan, and in the southern province of Yunnan. A total of 2,768 birds died and nearly 175,000 were destroyed to contain the virus.

Health experts had warned that human cases were inevitable if poultry outbreaks could not be stopped.

Also Wednesday, Xinhua said China will test 100 people with a vaccine hoped to protect against H5N1. There is currently no human vaccine. The report gave no other details, but said the vaccine had already been tested on minks, chickens and rats.

It is "safe and effective," Yin Weidong, general manager of Sinovac Biotech, one of the developers, was quoted as saying.

Sinovac Biotech and China's Center for Disease Control and Prevention jointly developed the vaccine, which uses a modified version of the bird flu virus from WHO, Xinhua said.