China reports new outbreak of bird flu

China on Wednesday announced its first reported outbreak of bird flu in more than two months, saying 2 600 birds had died from the disease on a farm in its northern Inner Mongolia region.

China's national bird flu laboratory confirmed that an epidemic on a farm near the Inner Mongolian capital of Hohhot was the H5N1 strain which is potentially lethal to humans, the Xinhua news agency reported.

The most recent confirmed case before this one was near the Tibetan capital of Lhasa in August, in which 133 birds died and another 2 475 were slaughtered.

The brief Xinhua report did not provide any detail on when the outbreak happened.

It said the ministry of agriculture had immediately dispatched teams to ensure necessary quarantine and disinfection measures were undertaken.

"Currently, the outbreak has been brought efficiently under control," the agency said.

"No new outbreaks have been discovered."

A Chinese doctor who became famous for his efforts to curb the SARS virus warned last month that a global outbreak of bird flu could happen at any time.

A global flu epidemic strikes every 20 to 50 years, and it is now more than 20 years since the last outbreak, Zhong Nanshan, director of the Guangzhou Institute of Respiratory Diseases, said according to Xinhua in September.

Asia has been battling bird flu since late 2003, with vaccination campaigns and massive culls of tens of millions of chickens and ducks that have devastated poultry industries, particularly in Thailand and Vietnam.

So far, it appears that all the human victims of bird flu contracted the disease from poultry, and not from other people.