BioWorld International Correspondent

MUNICH, Germany - Avian flu from the H5N1 virus might have killed at least 300 people in China, more than 3,000 may have landed in intensive care and seven cases of probable human transmission might be known to Chinese authorities, said virologist Masato Tashiro.

Those claims surfaced at a symposium held this week in Marburg, Germany, on the movements of RNA viruses between humans and animals.

Tashiro, head of the department of virology III of the National Institute of Infectious Disease in Japan, presented what he said was an unofficial, unpublished report from China on human H5N1 infections.

Tashiro traveled in the Chinese province of Hunan as part of the World Health Organization's follow-up research on avian flu in Asia.

He said that the document had been given to him by a reliable source.

Official WHO statistics confirm 71 human deaths from avian flu, with about double that number of infections. China officially has admitted to three infections and no deaths.

Tashiro served as director of the WHO's collaborating center for influenza at the National Institute of Infectious Diseases in Tokyo and was a leading researcher on SARS.

"We are being systematically lied to," Tashiro said at the conference, according to published accounts in the German media.

He said that at least five medical scientists with knowledge of the situation in Chinese provinces had been arrested and that researchers who were willing to publish had been threatened with punishment.

Hans Dieter Klenk, a professor of virology at the University of Marburg and the symposium's guest of honor, confirmed accounts of Tashiro's talk.