An expert called it ‘very irresponsible’ that Beijing hasn’t provided details on the severity and location of the cases.
“Sporadic” cases of human avian influenza infections have been identified in China, the regime has said, after staying quiet about outbreaks in poultries.
The announcement comes after two workers in China’s disease prevention and control sector told The Epoch Times the regime had covered up the severity of respiratory disease outbreaks in the country. One of the workers also said there had been limited human-to-human transmission of H5N1 avian influenza, or bird flu.
On Feb. 27, Beijing Daily, which is under the control of the Beijing Municipal Committee of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), cited the regime’s infectious disease prevention and control unit, saying there had been a rise in outbreaks of norovirus disease; hand, foot and mouth disease; tuberculosis, and other diseases.
The report also said that COVID-19 was spreading at a “relatively low level,” and that outbreaks of Mpox and human avian influenza had been “sporadic” and “low-incidence,” without providing details.
Microbiologist Dr. Sean Lin, member of the Committee on the Present Danger: China, and former researcher at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, criticized the CCP’s failure to disclose more information.
The regime “had to acknowledge there are cases of avian influenza in humans,” he told The Epoch Times. “It said [the infections were] ’sporadic‘ and ’low-incidence,’ but didn’t reveal the exact numbers of cases, severe cases, or fatality. Neither did it clarify where the cases are, or whether there are high-risk areas. This is very irresponsible.”
On Monday, the municipal Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in China‘s southwestern Chongqing city included human avian influenza in its notice of health risks in March.
The Municipal CDC in Huaihua city, Hunan province held a training session in late February on the response to respiratory diseases including flu, COVID-19, and human avian influenza, the local government said on Sunday.
Shanghai’s municipal authorities, which banned the trading of live poultries in the city in 2024, have also extended the ban to the end of 2027.
A Shanghai resident posted a photo of a sign on social media, which was reportedly taken at an emergency department in mid-February. The sign asks patients to inform medical staff if they have been in contact with birds in the past 10 days, have been in contact with COVID-19 patients, or have travel history to certain parts of the world in the past two weeks.
Lin said actions taken by local governments suggest they are very concerned over potential large-scale outbreaks of bird flu among humans.
Bird flu, which includes several subtypes, is a highly pathogenic disease caused by influenza A virus. It has mainly affected birds and other animals. People can catch the viruses from milk, feces, or other bodily fluids from infected animals, but known human-to-human transmission of the virus has been extremely rare, with only a handful of probable cases of limited, non-sustained transmission, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
According to the latest situation report published by the World Health Organisation (WHO), in 2024 and the first seven weeks of 2025, the Chinese regime has only reported a few cases of bird flu infections, including one case of H5N1 and one case of H10N3 detected in 2024.
Health Workers: Official Data Can’t Be Trusted
Beijing’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention has said flu-like symptoms in the current winter season were mostly driven by H1N1. However, locals have taken to social media to voice their suspicions that the CCP may have downplayed the role of COVID-19 and other respiratory diseases, including bird flu.
Speaking to the Chinese edition of The Epoch Times in January and February, an executive in China’s disease prevention and control sector, who was not named out of safety concerns, said various diseases have driven China’s deaths from respiratory diseases, including influenza A variants, COVID-19 variants, and bird flu.
On Feb. 15, he said that a variant of H5N1 had begun transmitting from human to human, although the transmission had remained inefficient, requiring physical contact.
When a case of bird flu is identified, the municipal CDC would isolate and test the patient’s family, and tell them they were tested for influenza A, he said.
In January, the executive said isolation areas had been set up around the country and were being expanded. He also said the regime was preparing for a large number of potential deaths.
An employee at a municipal CDC also told The Epoch Times that reported cases of influenza A were inflated to cover up other diseases.
“Lots of information was covered up here,” he said, adding that supposed cases of influenza A infections could be either H5N1 or “little cans,” one of the codenames used for COVID-19 to avoid censorship.
Between 2003 and 2024, a total of 954 cases of human H5N1 infection were reported to the WHO, with 464 (49 percent) of the cases being fatal. During the same period, China reported 56 cases, among which 32 (57 percent) were fatal.
The first death from H5N1 in the United States occurred in January in Louisiana. Officials said the patient had been exposed to wild birds and a “non-commercial backyard flock.”
Following the death, the WHO said the virus posed a low risk to the general public. The organization issued a warning last year after H5N1 infected cows and goats in the United States, saying the virus could become more dangerous to humans following mutations in mammals.
Silence on Outbreaks Among Poultry
Some local authorities in China have begun recently to mention the prevention of bird flu in animals.
On Monday, a local authority in Shanghai publicized its efforts to prevent infectious diseases in livestock, including bird flu. Northern China’s Tianjin city publicized similar preparations on Tuesday.
The announcements came after poultry farmers in China took to social media to complain over bird flu outbreaks, which they said had decimated flocks of birds.
Last month, a goose farmer said he knew of several farmers who had been affected, including two who lost thousands of geese. Another goose farmer said he knows several farmers who lost their entire flocks. A duck farmer described a similar situation.
However, China’s Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs and media outlets have remained silent on the domestic bird flu outbreaks, although they have provided detailed coverage of bird flu outbreaks outside China.
Between October 2024 and January 2025, China didn’t report any outbreak of high pathogenicity avian influenza, according to a map published in the World Organization for Animal Health’s latest situation report.
During the same period, 39 outbreaks were reported to the organization by other countries, mostly the United States, Japan, and European countries, the report shows.
Meanwhile, a 10-year-old research paper on H5N1, which was shared by Chinese social media users in January, was quickly purged.
In a previous interview with The Epoch Times, Lin said the CCP’s failure to warn the public about H5N1 outbreaks in poultry is likely to have “very serious consequences.”
If more people are infected with bird flu via birds, this could “seriously accelerate” the virus’s mutations, potentially allowing it to become infectious among humans more quickly, he warned.
Lin said Western countries should pressure the CCP to “disclose all data on bird flu, especially data on human infection with bird flu.”
Ho Mei-Shang, a Taiwanese infectious disease expert and former researcher at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Biomedical Sciences, told The Epoch Times in February that it is important to monitor bird flu outbreaks in China’s poultry farms, because China has a vaccination program for bird flu.
Outbreaks in China “show their vaccines probably have failed,” she said. Ho added that avian influenza viruses tend to mutate faster in countries that choose to use vaccines because of vaccine-elicited immune pressure.