China Rejects Claim It Covered Up First Outbreak of Bird Flu

China angrily denied reports yesterday it had been covering up an outbreak of bird flu for at least six months amid growing fears the deadly virus may have started earlier and spread wider than thought.

The deepening blame game came as Asian governments stepped up import bans and quarantines to control a disease that has claimed at least 10 lives and led to the slaughter of tens of millions of poultry.

The claims were printed in the New Scientist, which cited unnamed experts as saying the outbreak probably began in China in the first half of 2003 after a misconceived vaccination programme.

"A combination of official cover-up and questionable farming practices allowed it to turn into the epidemic," the British magazine said.

China, which claims to have found its first cases on Tuesday, rejected the claim. "We believe that this allegation is totally inaccurate, groundless and disrespectful to science," said a Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman, Zhang Qiyue.

The disease does appear to have been present in Asia long before the first reported outbreak in South Korea in December. The World Health Organisation said yesterday it had recently received samples containing the H5N1 virus dating back to last April.

It did not reveal where they had come from, but the disease's increased lifespan fuels concerns it has been spreading undetected for several months.

While China tightened its control measures yesterday, Indonesia made an embarrassing u-turn by ordering a cull, a measure it had rejected because of expensive compensation. A senior official described Jakarta's handling of the crisis as a "cock-up".

The political fallout is also being felt by the Thai prime minister, Thaksin Shinawatra, who has been accused of a disastrous cover-up by farmers and the families of the two confirmed victims. Scientists are testing whether six other deaths were down to the virus.

Despite the slaughter of 10 million chickens in Thailand, the disease was reported in six new provinces yesterday.

Ten Asian countries, from Pakistan to Japan are now affected. Others that have escaped have tightened imports. Singapore is culling crows. Australia said yesterday it would donate £500,000 to help tackle the outbreak.

The slaughter of chickens and ducks is now so widespread, and so rushed, the WHO has warned that the lack of safety procedures could spread the disease to humans taking part in the cull.

The warning comes as scientists plan to exhume a 20-year-old woman - buried in London in 1918 amid a flu epidemic which claimed 50 million lives - to discover if the virus was a strain of bird flu.

Chinese scientists have found evidence the Sars virus evolved rapidly to jump from animals to humans and then spread quickly from person to person. "If there's any lesson from this, it's stop it early before they know how to spread in humans," said Chung-I Wu of the University of Chicago.