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A researcher who reported that a Chinese man may have died
from avian influenza before anyone else in China was known to have the
disease denied on Friday he tried to have the report retracted,
according to the U.S. journal that published the report.
Dr. Wu Chun Cao of the State Key Laboratory of Pathogens and
Biosecurity in Beijing told The New England Journal of Medicine that
e-mails bearing his name sent to the journal this week were not written
or sent by him.
The authenticity of the letter sent to the journal reporting the case
is considered crucial because it reinforces suspicions there were more
human bird flu cases -- and earlier cases -- in China than Beijing has
admitted.
On Wednesday, the journal said it had received an e-mail signed with
the researcher's name that requested the letter reporting the case be
withdrawn from publication.
Wu has since telephoned the journal's editors and sent a fax denying he
had made any such request.
He was one of eight researchers who reported in the journal on
Wednesday that a 24-year-old man who died of pneumonia in November 2003
and was at first suspected as a SARS victim may have in fact died of
avian influenza.
"All tests were negative for SARS," the report said.
SARS first broke out in China's southern Guangdong province in 2002 and
spread as far as Canada before it was brought under control in 2003. It
killed close to 800 people out of the 8,000 known to have been infected.
Ironically, flu experts at the time assumed the then-mysterious
respiratory illness sickening people in China was H5N1 avian influenza,
which broke out in Hong Kong in 1997 and then disappeared.
Influenza experts say flu viruses rarely just disappear and had been
waiting for its return, which was reported in 2003.
The journal said Wednesday's report stands but that it was
investigating the e-mails sent under the researcher's name.
In the case of the 24-year-old man, tests of his tissue were positive
for influenza virus, and genetic sequencing later showed it to be H5N1
avian influenza.
It genetically resembled samples of viruses taken from Chinese chickens
in various provinces in 2004, the letter says.
The H5N1 avian flu virus has swept out of China across most of Asia,
into parts of Europe and Africa. While it is mainly a disease of birds,
it occasionally infects people and has killed 130 in nine countries.
Experts consider it could cause the next influenza pandemic and several
research labs and companies are rushing to develop a vaccine against
H5N1 just in case.
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