BEIJING (AFP) — A woman in Beijing has died of suspected bird flu after handling parts of a dead duck, Chinese state media said Tuesday.
If confirmed, the death would be the first reported death from the disease in in the country for nearly a year.
The woman, named as Huang Yanqing, died in the Chinese capital on Monday after buying nine ducks at a market in Beijing's neighbouring Hebei province, the Xinhua news agency reported.
Huang had cleaned the ducks' internal organs, Xinhua reported, citing the Beijing Health Bureau.
The bureau said 116 people had been in close contact with Huang. One nurse who had been in contact with her had contracted a fever but recovered, according to Xinhua, which gave no other details.
If confirmed as a bird flu death, it would be the first such case in China since a woman died of the disease in the southern province of Guangdong in February last year.
There have been no reported outbreaks of bird flu among poultry in Beijing recently but the disease did resurface in another province in the east of the country last month.
More than 370,000 chickens were culled in eastern Jiangsu province in December after the virus was detected among poultry on farms there.
The H5N1 strain of bird flu has killed 247 people since it re-emerged in Asia in 2003, according to the World Health Organisation's latest tally on its website.
Not including the suspected death in Beijing this week, 20 people in China have died of the disease over that time, while another 10 contracted it but survived.
Three of those Chinese deaths were at the start of last year.
Direct contact with infected poultry, or surfaces and objects contaminated by their faeces, is considered the main route of human infection, the WHO said on its website.
China is regarded as a potential bird flu flashpoint because it has the world's largest number of poultry, with tens of millions of chickens reared in densely populated areas.
Scientists fear the virus could eventually mutate into a form that is much more easily transmissible between humans, triggering a global pandemic.
The Beijing Health Bureau and the central government's Ministry of Health had no immediate comment on the latest suspected death when contacted by AFP on Tuesday.
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