China Says `Suspected` Bird Flu Patient Dies

The woman died on Monday. Her age was not known, Xinhua news agency said. There were no other details.

A woman suspected of being infected with bird flu has died in Beijing, the local health bureau said on Tuesday of what would be the first bird flu death in the country in almost a year.

The woman died on Monday. Her age was not known, Xinhua news agency said. There were no other details.

"The report is true, but there are no details so far," Zhang Jianshu, a spokesman with the publicity office of the Beijing Health Bureau, told Reuters by telephone.

The World Health Organisation's China office was not immediately able to provide comment.

Xinhua said the woman, from eastern Fujian province, had bought nine ducks at a market in Hebei province, which surrounds Beijing, and then gutted the birds.

"An emergency meeting was convened in Beijing on Monday evening to handle the bird flu case," the report said.

Since the H5N1 virus resurfaced in Asia in 2003, it has killed more than 200 people in a dozen countries, according to the World Health Organisation.

Experts fear the constantly mutating virus could change into a form easily transmitted from person to person and potentially kill millions of people worldwide.

The last known reported fatality in China was in February last year when a 44-year-old woman died in the southern province of Guangdong.

At least 20 people have died of bird flu in China to date.

With the world's biggest poultry population and hundreds of millions of farmers raising birds in their backyards, China is seen as crucial in the global fight against bird flu.

A five-year-old has been infected with bird flu in neighbouring Vietnam, the first human case reported in the country this year, Vietnam's state-run television said on Tuesday.