Bloomberg’s “The Ticker”: China Pretends Bird Flu Doesn’t Exist
Adam Minter, a Shanghai-based contributor to Bloomberg View

“…According to a Feb. 4 report by Xinhua, China’s state-owned newswire, poultry companies and associations in Guangdong province, home to a significant percentage of China’s most recent H7N9 bird flu infections, are proposing to require local authorities drop ‘bird’ or ‘avian’ and simply refer to the disease as ‘the flu.’ … This is madness. Timely, accurate disclosure of avian influenza cases (of which there have been hundreds of confirmed cases in China since early 2013), including information on how those cases were transmitted, is a critical means of educating the Chinese public about the disease and how to avoid it. And teaching the public also includes disclosing the probable source of the disease: birds…” (2/6).