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New allegations from a credible source place the number of human bird flu cases in China at 30 times the World Health Organization's (WHO) current tally.
"Shockingly there are 425 patients who have contracted bird flu [in China]," a former Chinese journalist has revealed to The Epoch Times . As of March 10, the WHO has confirmed only 15 human cases of the deadly H5N1 bird flu in China, part of a global total of 176.
The reporter, who spent many years doing in-depth reporting in China and has recently sought refuge in the United States, asked that his identity be kept confidential for reasons of personal safety. As a testament to his reliability, he was among the first on the scene to report on the Shanwei Massacre last December, when Chinese police shot to death as many as 70 protesting villagers in Guangdong Province.
True to his profession, the source presents compelling, specific evidence.
"I can give the names of two institutions [involved in a cover-up], Shenyang City Contagious Disease Hospital in Heping District, Shenyang, and the Affiliated Hospital of Liaoning College of Traditional Chinese Medicine in Huanggu District, Shenyang," he said, citing two hospitals in China's Liaoning Province he alleges are holding the 425 patients.
The journalist says that he obtained his information from a Shenyang Municipal Public Health Bureau internal report. He also believes that the Liaoning provincial authorities are keeping the situation secret, even from the central government in Beijing.
"What is the Provincial Committee's policy in handling this issue? It is to not report to upper-level authorities any outbreaks of bird flu, and all bird flu patients in the hospital are being treated as experimental medical subjects," he said.
These are not the first allegations of a bird flu cover-up in China. Last November, WHO bird flu consultant Dr. Masato Tashiro presented unverified data of at least 300 people having died from H5N1 bird flu, and 3,000 having been infected, to a room full of top virologists attending a conference at the University of Marburg in Germany.
Last May, University of Hong Kong researcher Dr. Yi Guan published findings on the high lethality of H5N1 virus from a massive H5N1 outbreak in wild birds at Qinghai Lake, speculating that the virus would spread quickly throughout Asia via migratory pathways. A day after publication, he found the mainland Joint Influenza Research Center, where he did his work, abruptly shut down by the Ministry of Agriculture. The center denied the Ministry claim that the lab lacked "the basic conditions for biological safety."
The Epoch Times ' source also alleges human bird flu outbreaks in two other Chinese provinces, though he declined to give the details at this time. "I have found and can prove that now there are large number of cases of [human] bird flu infection in Zhalong, Heilongjiang Province and Xianghai, Jilin Province," he said.
The WHO also believes that the spread of bird flu in humans in China may be greater than what has been reported. "It's very conceivable that there are more cases," said Dr. Henk Bekedam, the WHO's China representative, according to a recent Associated Press report. He added that he did not have the impression that the central ministry is hiding something—but this statement can be viewed in the context of the WHO being absolutely dependent on Beijing's cooperation to do any work in China at all.
It has been a continual struggle for the WHO to obtain samples from infected birds and humans in China, with the authorities preferring to keep data to themselves. While China remains the most significant and certainly the most disputed locality for H5N1 outbreak and mutation, independent verification of even the known H5N1 infections in the country has been virtually non-existent.
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