April 1, 2013
Dashiell Bennett
Two men from Shanghai have died from a new strain of bird flu in the last month, sparking rumors that it might be related to the "pig soup" that has taken over local rivers. Health officials don't yet believe that
this new version of the flu, known as H7N9, can be transmitted from
human-to-human, but it's easy to see how people might make the leap to a
more upsetting conclusion.
One of the two men who died was elderly, and not an usual victim for these types of odd viruses. But the second was a 27-year-old who allegedly sold pork
in a local market. It didn't take long for people to make a connection
between that and the more than 10,000 pigs recently fished out of the
Huangpu river after dying of an unknown malady. Officials sill haven't
given a definitive answer about where the pigs came from, but users of China's social media services
have already put two and two together and spread questions and fears
around the country. It helps (or doesn't) that the director of the
University of Hong Kong's Infectious Disease Center admitted there could
be a connection, with the bird flu possibly mutating within pigs before
spreading elsewhere.
There's no actual evidence of that yet,
but state authorities will likely have to come up with more concrete
answers if they want to avoid a panic. They may also need to push hard
to find the source that dead pig debacle and severely punish whoever
dumped them illegally. There's also been a different bird flu outbreaks in India, Cambodia, Indonesia, and elsewhere in 2013, which makes it important to tamp down the fear that another H1N1 will soon upon Southeast Asia. Unfortunately, sometimes the rumors are even harder to stop from spreading than the disease.
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