Beijing’s Municipal Commission of City Administration and Environment said in a statement that the regulations aimed to standardise toilet management at places such as parks, railway stations, hospitals and shopping malls.

An unnamed official from the commission told local media that the guidelines on flies were meant for easy monitoring.

However media reports cast doubt over whether the guidelines could be enforced.

A commentary published in the Beijing News said one central Beijing district implemented a similar rule in 2008 when the city hosted the Olympic Games, but sanitation and hygiene still varied from toilet to toilet.

Effort should be invested on educating the public to use public toilets in a better manner, said the commentary.

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The latest victim, 39, fell ill on January 6 and was subsequently admitted to hospital in Guiyang – capital of Guizhou province – where his condition rapidly deteriorated, the provincial health department said in a statement.

Tests on the patient before he died confirmed he had contracted the H5N1 virus, it added.

“So far, 71 people who had close contact with the victim have not developed abnormal symptoms,” the health department said.

The latest bird flu death brings to 28 the number of people in China who have died from the disease – which is fatal in humans in about 60 per cent of cases – since 2003, out of 42 reported human cases.

After the earlier death of a man in Shenzhen, Hong Kong officials banned poultry from the mainland for 21 days. Mainland officials are now insisting that the most recent patient did not have any contact with poultry. The Washington Post reports:

Mainland officials told Hong Kong authorities the patient was a 39-year-old man who reported having no contact with poultry, government-run Hong Kong broadcaster RTHK said. It gave no other details of his identity.

Last week, Vietnam reported its first bird flu fatality in nearly two years — an 18-year-old man who worked on a duck farm.

In Cambodia, a 2-year-old boy died last week after reportedly having contact with sick poultry in his village, according to the World Health Organization.

Indonesia also has reported one bird flu death this year.

See also China, Hong Kong on bird flu alert via CDT.

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Despite this being peak influenza season, Dr. Lo Wing-lok – an infectious diseases expert and former Hong Kong legislator – remains optimistic that the Shenzhen case may yet prove isolated. “Despite talks about mutation, the situation remains the same. The disease remains a bird-to bird disease; occasionally a bird-to-human disease,” he explained. “But far from a human-to-human disease.”

However, Lo is skeptical of the Shenzhen authorities’ suggestion that avian flu is not prevalent among local poultry stocks, and that Chen likely contracted the H5N1 virus from wild birds. “This is a poultry virus, not a wild bird virus. Blaming human infection on wild birds is not conducive to epidemic control because people might become complacent about poultry, about slaughtering sick birds. As a result, more human cases could occur,” he said.

Residents of Hong Kong and the adjacent mainland Chinese province of Guangdong, in which Shenzhen is located, have reason to feel nervous about Chen’s death.

However, the Hong Kong Center for Health Protection confirmed Tuesday that the virus strain which killed Chen is similar to the strain found in dead birds in Hong Kong last month.

Chinese authorities claim that the H5N1 avian virus cannot be transmitted through humans, but Hong Kong authorities have banned poultry imports from the mainland for 21 days after a dead chicken was discovered to have been infected with the bird flu virus. Reuters adds:

“The virus found in the patient was 90 percent similar to H5N1 viruses previously isolated in ducks in China, which suggested that the man was very likely to have been infected through direct contact with a bird,” the Shenzhen Center for Disease Prevention and Control said in a statement.

“It is still not transmissible between people,” it said, adding that the bus driver was probably infected through direct contact with birds.

The virus is normally found in birds but can occasionally jump to people. Researchers worry that the virus could mutate into a form that would spread easily between humans.

Hong Kong culled 17,000 chickens at a wholesale poultry market two weeks ago after a dead chicken there tested positive for H5N1 avian virus, and suspended imports of live chickens from the mainland for 21 days in a bid to prevent any spread of the disease.

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“Discriminatory rules against AIDS patients in the public servants’ physical examination fly in the face of Chinese law,” Yu Fangqiang, a lawyer and activist with the pressure group Tianxia Gong told AFP.

Yu said the education departments and a court that refused to hear the case of one of the men had violated the Prevention and Treatment of Infectious Diseases and Employment Promotion laws and the Regulation on the Prevention and Treatment of HIV/AIDS.

UNAIDS China country coordinator Mark Stirling said the organisation was watching China’s reaction to the appeal closely.

“There should be no discrimination. Employment should be based solely on qualifications, not on a teacher’s HIV status,” Stirling told AFP. “The risk of HIV-AIDS transmission in a classroom setting is virtually nil.”

According to the Chinese Center for Disease Control (CDC), there are 434,000 registered HIV and AIDS patients in China, but there are estimates that predict 787,000 carriers by the end of 2011. Xinhua adds:

China has been boosting distribution of HIV/AIDS tests among spouses of carriers and others who have close contact with them, the statement said, adding that a total of 67.45 million HIV tests were conducted across the country between January and October, up 16.5 percent year-on-year.

These tests found 61,000 HIV carriers and AIDS patients.

The latest figures from the CDC showed that China has registered 434,000 HIV carriers and AIDS patients, as well as 88,000 deaths due to the disease, since 1985, when the first case was found in the country.

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The new generation of drugs that may relieve sufferers and supplant Glucobay has already begun its march into China.

Merck’s Januvia went on sale last year, and Novo’s Victoza became available in October. Lilly and Amylin Pharmaceuticals Inc. (AMLN)’s Byetta won approval in 2009. All three work in different ways to prompt the pancreas to make insulin, the hormone that diabetics need to break down the sugar that builds up in their blood stream.

By 2016, newer classes of drugs will be the fastest-growing diabetes medicines in China, estimates Vineet Kashyap, an analyst for IMARC Group in New Delhi. Medicines such as Januvia, Victoza and Byetta are likely to hold 17 percent of the market by then, approaching the one-quarter share estimated for drugs in Glucobay’s class of starch blockers, Kashyap said.

Eventually, new drugs may come from within China. At the diabetes institute of Shanghai Jiao Tong University Affiliated 6th People’s Hospital, dozens of journal publications hang on the wall next to the office of director Weiping Jia, who led the Shanghai portion of the diabetes study published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

See also: China’s Annual $26 Billion Diabetes Bill to Skyrocket via CDT.

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The disease is now on the wane, after long-term study of the villagers, many of whom traditionally lived in caves, led to large-scale public-health interventions focused on nutrition, hygiene and sometimes moving whole villages to another location.

In 2009, the number of people living with the disease was down to 700,000 of whom only about 18,000 were children. Researchers expect the 2010 data to show further declines in cases.

Kashin-Beck “is an environmental, society and medical disease,” said Dr. Guo. “If these [factors] can be controlled, we’ll eradicate the disease.”

It is a rare victory over a condition that disproportionately affects the rural poor, accomplished by dint of extensive, often grueling field work. The effort also represents a major public-health commitment in a country that until recently left its citizens to seek out and pay for health care largely on their own.

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According to a recent study published in the American Journal of Health Behavior, the difference between obese people in China and those in the U.S. is striking, suggesting that assumptions about obesity patterns in the West can’t be applied to China’s increasingly overweight population.

Researchers of the study, “Correlates of Overweight Status in Chinese Youth: an East-West Paradox,” zoned in on China’s adolescent population, looking at the relationship between such factors as sleep, diet, exercise and income on obesity among young people.

What they found: Chinese children raised in families with higher incomes and advanced education levels are more likely to become obese.

Findings of the study contrast distinctly with the obese populations of the U.S. and even Europe, where children and adults have waistline sizes that correlate to the degree of their poverty. Overweight American youth tend to be from neighborhoods where fresh produce is less available, from families with lower educational backgrounds and less knowledge of general nutrition.

Read more about obesity in China via CDT.

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About 63 percent of all those needing AIDS drugs are getting them, up from virtually zero in 2002. That has caused a 64 percent drop in mortality in “person-years,” as China measures it, an estimate of how long someone would have lived without the disease.

AIDS mortality dropped to 14.2 per 100 person-years in 2009, from 39.3 in 2002.

The study, led by China’s national center for control and prevention of AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases, was published online on Wednesday by Lancet Infectious Diseases.

China’s success in such a short time “is a testimony to the young midlevel scientists who convinced the leadership that this was the right thing to do,” said Dr. Myron Cohen, an AIDS specialist from the University of North Carolina who has lived in China and helped it battle the epidemic.

Meanwhile, another report found that people with AIDS in China are routinely denied hospital care due to ignorance about the disease even within the medical profession. From Reuters:

Based on interviews with 103 people living with HIV and 23 healthcare workers, the ILO and China’s National Center for STD and AIDS Prevention and Control found that people have been refused medical care and have been discriminated against by healthcare workers.

One HIV-positive man, talking at a news conference to unveil the report, recounted how he was denied medical treatment for his back problem because of his HIV status in hospitals in Tianjin and Beijing.

“The doctor said at our hospital, many patients need surgery, and if other patients get infected, it will be a very bad thing,” said the man, who declined to be identified.

“At the second hospital … the doctor told me: ‘I sympathize with your suffering but because of your status, I dare not operate on you’,” said the man, who is a farmer from Tianjin and added he was forced to leave his job in a steel firm after his boss discovered he had HIV.

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The government will continue to overhaul the food industry, concentrating in particular on dairy products, cooking oil, health foods, meat and alcohol this year, said Zhang Yong, director of the executive office of the food safety commission under the State Council, the nation’s Cabinet.

“China is in a period when food safety incidents are likely to arise” because the food industry is developing rapidly and many food producers and restaurants run small-scale businesses sometimes haphazardly, Zhang told Xinhua News Agency on Thursday.

Zhang gave pig-raising as an example, saying that China has more than 67 million pig farmers while the number of their counterparts in the United States has dropped to 70,000.

Most Chinese pig farms are small businesses, and they are spread across the country, posing huge supervisory difficulties, he said.

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The harsh repression in China these days rightly garners headlines, but health data reflect another side of a nation that could scarcely be more complex and contradictory.

For those who remember Shanghai a quarter-century ago as a dilapidated city where farmers would collect night soil from families without sanitation, it’s extraordinary that among permanent residents of Shanghai, infant mortality is 2.9 deaths per 1,000 births. That is well below the rate of 5.3 in New York City. (Include migrant laborers living in Shanghai, perhaps a fairer comparison, and the rate climbs to a bit higher than in New York.)

That Shanghai child enjoys a world-class education in a public school — the best school system of any in a recent 65-nation survey, although it’s also true that Chinese schools have their own problems such as widespread cheating and stifling of creativity.

Since 1990, the country has reduced infant mortality rates by 54 percent, according to Unicef statistics. On a Chinese scale, that represents more than 360,000 children’s lives saved each year.

That’s what makes China such a fascinating and contradictory place. Other countries, from Egypt to North Korea, oppress and impoverish their people. But the Chinese Communist Party in the reform era has been oppressive politically — even worse lately, with the harshest clampdown in two decades — while hugely enriching its people.

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