International experts in China to trace the bird flu virus

A team of international experts from the World Health Organisation and the Centre of Disease Control in Atlanta is visiting southern China to look for traces of the bird flu virus, which has killed six people in Hong Kong so far -- two this week.

The Chinese authorities have consistently denied that the virus originated in poultry farms in the south; but health experts have always suspected that the virus originated there.

Southern China was also the source of the Hong Kong flu which killed almost fifty-thousand people worldwide in 1968.

From the newsroom of the BBC World Service