As Bird Flu Spreads to Hunan Province and Taiwan, Is It Time To Panic?
![Live Chickens in a Chicken Coop](https://d.medicaldaily.com/en/full/227135/live-chickens-chicken-coop.jpg?w=615&f=ee29c50ec014755cdd3e5b1e418c7e12)
As it stands, 23 people have been killed by the new strain of H7N9 bird flu in China and cases continue to pop up in provinces in China and even across the strait of Taiwan.
On Saturday the official Chinese state news agency, Xinhua, announced that a 64 year old woman in Hunan Province, which is around 600 miles from the infection epicenter in Shanghai, has become ill. The woman became ill and developed a fever on April 14, four days after she had come into contact with life poultry.
With cases being reported all over Shanghai, Beijing, and even on the island of Taiwan, it seems that the virus is highly mobile. There is currently no evidence that the virus can spread between humans; scientists believe that all those who have contracted the illness had close proximity to and were infected by live poultry.
So far over 110 people are confirmed to have been infected. Early symptoms of the infection have been fever and respiratory illness leading, in some cases, to hospitalization and death.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and one of the top virologists in the United States, warned that human to human transmission of the virus is possible if it mutates.
"That is powerful evidence because if you had a thousand contacts with someone with the flu you would be pretty sure some of them would have been infected... we still need to be very prepared for the eventuality of that happening." Dr. Fauci said in an interview with Agence France Presse.
Quick tests and vaccines are currently in development and trials for vaccine candidates should be tested in July or August.
As long as there is no evidence of human to human transmission, there is little risk of the virus becoming an epidemic.