CRI听力:All Provincial Regions Can Test For H7N9

Chinese Health authorities have sent a total of 160-thousand samples to provincial labs for testing.

Authorities are developing the testing reagents as quickly as possible to control the potential spread of H7N9 outside the Yangtze River Delta region.

Yao Weimin is with the Animal disease control and Prevention Center in the city of Zhenjiang in Jiangsu.

"The H7N9 bird flu virus is highly pathogenic to human, but has little impact on birds. In fact, most birds don't show symptoms or die because of the virus. It may be a latent virus. As such, it's only through lab samples that can we test whether birds are positive for the virus."

In order to effectively cope with the new strain of bird flu, health authorities in Shanghai, Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Anhui have agreed to pool their resources to try to control the spread of the disease.

This includes information sharing and other cooperation.

Meanwhile, an international team is being organized to offer technical support for Chinese health authorities.

Subhash Morzaria with the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization says the Chinese government has been taking the right steps in trying to prevent the virus from spreading.

"So the bio-security means, two things, one is to ensure the infection doesn't spread from where the primacies. And if your.. to your. That is bio-security. Now government plays a very important role for example in China. In all these four provinces, the government has banned first all the live market. Second one, the government has stopped export of poultry from these four provinces to the neighboring provinces of China."

Chinese health authorities say their main goal now is monitoring for signs of the virus in both the areas affected and regions which haven't seen cases of H7N9.

They're looking for changes in the virus, such as its resistance to drugs.

They're also looking for variations of the gene sequences to try to isolate them before mutations can lead to human-to-human transmissions.

For CRI, this is Li Jing.