H.K. bird flu expert accused of leaking state secrets: report

Asian Economic News, July 18, 2005

HONG KONG, July 12 Kyodo

A leading microbiologist in Hong Kong has been accused of leaking state secrets in a collaborative report on the deadly bird flu published in a London-based science journal recently, a local newspaper reported Tuesday.

Guan Yi, a leading microbiologist on SARS and bird flu with the Hong Kong University, said he received a call from a Chinese Agriculture Ministry official and was told he might have leaked state secrets, the Hong Kong Economic Times said.

The official also allegedly told him his report had exaggerated the number of birds that died from the flu and had incorrectly stated that the outbreak originated in southern China.

A spokeswoman with the Hong Kong University's school of medicine said the school has been unable to contact Guan, who is traveling in China. The Agriculture Ministry in Beijing was unavailable for comment.

The report, ''Highly Pathogenic H5N1 Influenza Virus Influence in Migratory Birds,'' conducted jointly by the Hong Kong University and Shantou University in Guangdong Province, was published in the Nature magazine on July 7. Guan was the lead researcher on the project.

The report concludes that the H5N1 strain of bird flu virus causing the outbreak at Qinghai Lake in western China is probably from poultry in the south.

It warns that the virus, now being transmitted between migratory birds at the lake, might be carried by the migratory birds to densely populated areas in South Asia and spread as a new strain to Europe.

Guan was quoted by the newspaper as saying after the report was released that the Chinese government has introduced a set of new rules to tighten control over research on infectious diseases.

Among the rules published on the official Chinese Veterinary Drug Information Net, no autopsy of poultry or wild animals will be allowed without permission of a government department at the provincial level or above.

It prohibits any person or unit from taking the viral samples outside of China without approval by the Agriculture Ministry, and reiterates that under the Infectious Disease Prevention Law, no one is allowed to release information about epidemics without government approval.

A notice issued along with the new rules says more stringent rules are needed since some research units without proper safety equipment and measures have collected viral samples without authorization during the recent outbreak of bird flu in Qinghai.

At the onset of the SARS epidemic in the spring of 2003, when Hong Kong's health officials tried confirm with mainland authorities rumors of the disease spreading in Guangdong, they were told that infectious disease information is considered a state secret.