China's bird flu epidemic is currently controllable, say Minister of Health Gao Qiang in Shanghai Sunday, who is attending the Shanghai Healthy City International Forum.

Gao told Xinhua that China has basically brought the bird flu under control, saying that the Heishan County in northeast China's Liaoning Province, where the disease epidemic was most grave, has not reported any new infectious cases for 10 days.

He further explained that the epidemic will end soon though the spread still occurred in some other provinces.

"The spread of bird flue virus is caused mainly by migratory birds and their migration has almost completed," Gao acknowledged.

The effective control of the virus spread among poultry will reduce the human infectious cases, Gao said, adding that the chance for human infection is limited.

Compared with the grave situation of Symptoms of Acute Respiratory Syndrom or SARS in 2003, China's monitoring and control over bird flu are being performed in a more systematic and orderly manner, Gao said. All sanitation stations and clinics at the grassroots level are granted the rights and responsibilities to timely report the disease to relevant high authorities so that experts can arrive as quickly as possible.

"We have sent the epidemic prevention and control professionals to all the places that had reported bird flu cases," Gao added.

The awareness of epidemic prevention and control among the general public has also been remarkably heightened, noted the minister, who ascribed it also as a crucial reason that the country's bird flu epidemic is now controllable.

Source: Xinhua