Chinese health officials have reported a bird flu outbreak near the epicenter of the mysterious new coronavirus.
The officials reported the bird flu outbreak on Saturday in Hunan, a mountainous province in southern China, which borders Hubei, a providence in Central China, where the deadly coronavirus, aka 2019-nCoV, broke out last month, per the South China Morning Post.
Chinese authorities said, “The [bird flu] outbreak occurred in a farm in the Shuangqing district of Shaoyang City. The farm has 7,850 chickens, and 4,500 of the chickens have died from the contagion.”
Bird flu, also called the H5N1 virus, is a fatal infectious disease that is highly contagious and causes severe respiratory diseases in birds, according to the World Health Organization.
The flu can be transmitted from humans to humans; however, there have been no confirmed cases of the illness so far.
The bird flu outbreak has been declared amid the ongoing Wuhan coronavirus outbreak, which has sickened more than 17,200 people and killed 361 people in China.
People infected with the H5N1 virus are statistically 50 percent more likely to die than with severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) or with the new coronavirus. China had to face a bird flu outbreak back in 2013, which ended up costing the nation $6.5 billion in economic losses, according to the UN.
