Pneumonia patients will be tested for H5N1
All pneumonia patients will be tested for H5N1 for three weeks from today in a stepped-up surveillance programme against bird flu.
The tests will be carried out at all hospitals and clinics in Hong Kong, along with checks on the patients' travel history, the Centre for Health Protection said yesterday.
'We want to make sure that patients with pneumonia who might have H5N1 are not missed,' centre consultant Tsang Ho-fai told RTHK's Backchat programme.
International experience has found that most patients with H5N1 - including Lao Qiliang , who died in Guangzhou on March 2 - showed symptoms of pneumonia.
Dr Tsang said that under the surveillance programme, doctors at public and private medical facilities would be asked to be alert for patients with symptoms who had travelled to bird flu-infected areas.
A Health Department spokesman said the tests would be provided by a laboratory network, including the department's Public Health Laboratory Centre and five public hospitals. Results are usually known within hours. Contact tracing will be performed for any human cases of bird flu. A member of a Hong Kong delegation who met Guangdong officials on Monday said it was not possible that Lao, the province's first H5N1 fatality, had been infected by airborne transmission.
'According to the World Health Organisation, there is no evidence that the route of transmission for bird flu is airborne,' said Chuang Shuk-kwan, a principal medical officer at the Centre for Health Protection. 'The main route is still direct contact with live poultry.'
She said Lao had been critically ill with severe pneumonia when he was admitted to hospital. Disease investigators in Guangdong found that Lao had visited up to eight market stalls for research as he planned to set up his own store. He mostly stayed for about only 10 minutes.
'But in one of the market stalls he stayed for some time because he knew the owner,' Dr Chuang said.
This stall sold meat and other food. Next to and opposite it were two stalls selling chickens, ducks and geese. 'One of the possibilities is he may have acquired the infection from the market,' she said.
Dr Chuang added that 122 contacts and poultry workers placed under medical surveillance would be tested twice for antibodies.
The team also learned that the Guangdong Centre for Disease Control had been checking severe pneumonia cases since January to identify any undiagnosed cases of bird flu.
In Beijing, Guangdong Governor Huang Huahua confirmed that Lao was a market researcher who frequently visited wet markets. Lao's girlfriend also showed fever symptoms but had not been affected with H5N1, Mr Huang said.
Influenza is a significant cause of hospital admissions in Hong Kong, despite the city's predominantly warm climate, a University of Hong Kong study has found.
