A US-based Chinese-language news website known as Boxun, or 'Abundant News', has riveted the online medical community over the past month with a series of reports from China's Qinghai province about an alleged bird flu cover-up. One report - said to be leaked by a Chinese official - claimed that 121 people were dead from avian influenza, or H5N1.
China has denied the claims, but for anyone who follows both Chinese-language underground news agencies and the medical organisations that obsessively monitor emerging viruses, the Boxun reports and the international online response to them recalls early 2003, when news emerged of a killer virus in Guangdong. The virus was Sars, which became a menace overnight after a Boxun report interrupted a long media clampdown by Beijing.
Boxun's Sars story was translated into English and repeated by ProMED-mail, an online reporting system that keeps subscribers informed of outbreaks of new diseases. Now Boxun is either leading the pack again, or leading it astray - and Boxun's founder doesn't rule out the latter. Nevertheless, ProMED picked up the story once again and the world's online community of virus watchers has been discussing it since.
'We've been following the reports very closely for several weeks,' said Peter Cordingley, a public information officer for the WHO Regional Office for the Western Pacific in Manila. 'We have no independent confirmation of them.'
Boxun's founder, who goes by the pseudonym of Wei Shi and describes himself as a businessman, said from the US that he could not verify the web-posted stories from Qinghai that Boxun had run.
Nor could he vouch for the alleged whistleblower's credentials. All Boxun's non-secondary source reports are posted anonymously. But he said he hoped that by putting the stories in the public domain, somebody would prove them true or false.