First human case of new bird flu recorded in Beijing

A seven-year-old girl is Beijing's first human case of H7N9 bird flu, local authorities said on Saturday as China's outbreak of the disease spread to the capital.

The girl, whose parents are poultry traders, was in a stable condition in hospital, the Beijing health bureau said. Her mother and father had been quarantined for observation but had shown no symptoms so far, it added.

She developed a fever, sore throat and headache on Thursday, it said, and her parents took her to hospital. Samples from her tested positive for H7N9 the following day, and the national disease control centre confirmed the results on Saturday.

Chinese officials announced nearly two weeks ago that they had found the H7N9 strain in humans for the first time, and the girl brought the number of confirmed infections to 44, 11 of whom have died.

All previous cases in the outbreak had been confined to eastern China, hundreds of kilometres (miles) from the capital.

Experts fear the prospect of such viruses mutating into a form easily transmissible between humans, which would have the potential to trigger a pandemic.

But the World Health Organization (WHO) said this week that there was as yet no evidence of human-to-human transmission of H7N9.