Six new cases of bird flu reported in China

Six more cases of bird flu were reported in China today taking the total number of persons infected with the deadly H7N9 virus to 114.
State media said the new figures were from different provinces in the country. The avian influenza has already claimed 23 lives in China.
This development comes a day after scientists declared they had made a breakthrough in understanding the spread of the infection, determining poultry wet market to be the source of the disease.
This was revealed in a research published online yesterday by the leading international medical journal The Lancet, conducted by a collaborative research team from The University of Hong Kong and Zhejiang University.

The scientists analysed four infected patients in southeast China's Zhejiang Province.
They discovered for the first time that the virus found in their system was genetically very closely related to the chicken virus isolated from epidemiologically linked poultry market, state-run news agency Xinhua reported.