President calls for cross-strait cooperation on H7N9 vaccine
ROC Central News Agency
2013/04/09 13:29:27
Taipei, April 9 (CNA) President Ma Ying-jeou has expressed the hope that the two sides of the Taiwan Strait will cooperate in producing a vaccine against the new H7N9 avian flu, which has already claimed the lives of seven people in China.
'We hope to produce vaccines to curb the disease's spread through a cross-strait cooperation mechanism,' based on a medical cooperation agreement the two sides inked in December 2010, the president said Tuesday while meeting with representatives of the Hoover Institution.
As of Monday night, China had confirmed 24 cases of the deadly bird flu, with seven people having died from the disease.
A health official in Jiangsu province said Monday that a major outbreak of the H7N9 flu was unlikely because there have yet to be human-to-human transmissions of the virus and the cases have been sporadic.
'The possibility of a repeat of the big outbreak of serious acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) a decade ago is minimal,' said Wang Hua, deputy director of the province's Health Department, noting that human-to-human transmissions of SARS were far more prevalent.
The World Health Organization (WHO) said Monday that it was still too early to discuss whether mortality rates for the H7N9 virus were higher than for other viruses.
Gregory Hartl, a spokesman for the Geneva-based WHO, told CNA that it was still hard to pinpoint the total number of H7N9 cases, and experts did not have enough information with which to make a judgment.
One theory on the disease advanced recently by the Chinese Academy of Sciences is that the H7N9 virus derives from a gene recombination of wild birds from Korea and poultry in Shanghai and Zhejiang and Jiangsu provinces in China.
(By Lee Shu-hua, Chiu Kuo-chiang, Emmanuelle Tseng and Lilian Wu)
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