Special report: Guangdong fight against bird flu>>>

Chinese Ministry of Health on Tuesday confirmed the country's first human case of H5N1 bird flu occurred in November 2003.

A letter published by eight Chinese scientists on June 22 in the New England Journal of Medicine said that the bird flu virus was isolated in a 24-year-old man who died in Beijing in 2003.

The man, surnamed Shi, became ill with pneumonia and respiratory disease on November 2003 and died four days after being hospitalized. Since China was then in the aftershock of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), the case was suspected of a SARS case, but lab tests were negative for SARS.

The ministry confirmed this human case of bird flu by parallel laboratory tests, which were carried out in collaboration with the World Health Organization (WHO).

Before the case was revealed, China's first officially reported human infection of bird flu in the mainland was on Nov. 16, 2005. Nineteen human cases have been confirmed since then, including 12 deaths.

"Although this human infection confirmed in the mainland was two years earlier than previous figures, it has no indication that China had an outbreak of bird flu in 2003," said Mao Qun'an, spokesman for the Ministry of Health.

"People need not panic," he told Xinhua in an interview. "The surveillance capability of bird flu in the country is significantly strengthened nowadays in comparison with two years ago."

Mao said the ministry treated the case as a result of an individual scientific research, and had no plan to probe more cases in that period.

Globally, 233 people had been confirmed to contract bird flu and 135 of them had died by Aug. 7, according to figures from the WHO.

Editor: Donald