BEIJING: Health officials in a Chinese province denied the findings of a US university study that said their region was the source of many strains of the deadly bird flu virus, state media said on Wednesday.
"The findings... are the wrong conclusion to the evidence and lack credibility," the China Daily quoted He Xia, a spokeswoman for the agricultural department in Guangdong province, as saying.
Yu Dewen, a provincial health spokesman, said no official research had shown that bird flu originated in the southern province, the paper said.
Researchers at the University of California at Irvine, combining genetic and geographic data, identified Guangdong as the source of many strains of the H5N1 virus in a study published on Monday.
From 192 samples gathered from Europe and Asia, the researchers concluded that Guangdong, the home of a large poultry industry, was the source of many of the H5N1 strains that subsequently spread around China and to other countries.
World health officials are concerned that the virus could mutate so it could be passed from human to human, and have warned that should that happen there could be a global pandemic.
According to the World Health Organisation, 275 people have fallen ill with the H5N1 virus and a total of 167 people have died.
