Originally Posted by DateDoc

HONG KONG (AFP) ? Hong Kong scrambled Thursday to contain any outbreak of bird flu after recording its first human case of the illness since 2003, a 59-year-old woman now in a serious condition in hospital.

The government raised the teeming city's avian influenza alert level to "serious", meaning there is a "high risk" of contracting the potentially fatal disease, a spokesman for the Department of Health told AFP.

Hong Kong recorded its last human case of bird flu in 2003, and had the world's first major outbreak among humans in 1997, when six people died of a then-unknown mutation of the virus.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20101118...gfluhealthbird