Authorities in eastern China have begun culling thousands of birds from a live market while local residents scrambled on Friday to protect themselves from the H7N9 virus, as the death toll from the new strain of bird flu mounted to six.
A Shanghai resident surnamed Zhou said he had been scouring local pharmacies to find a popular traditional preventive remedy for cold and flu viruses: a tea made from woad, or ysatis tinctoria.
"I have been around five different stores looking for woad tea but they are all out," Zhou said. "They still have other cold remedies, but anything that can treat a virus is selling fast."
A Shanghai resident surnamed Mao said she had waited in long queues at the emergency room in the city's Tongji Hospital after she took her two daughters there with a cold or flu on Friday.
"We bought some woad tea, just in case," Zhang said. "There are a lot of people wearing face masks on the streets now, and I heard that they are rushing to grab them in the stores."
Netizens reported a similar run on woad tea, known in Chinese as banlangen, with some blaming the government for panic buying.
"It's because the government is covering up the true situation, so that people don't know how bad it is, that we are forced to rely on banlangen to ward it off," wrote microblog user @nuowendashu.
Live markets closed
The Shanghai municipal government announced on Friday the temporary closure all of the city's live poultry markets, without saying for how long.
The Huhai agricultural market, where the H7N9 avian flu virus was reported to have been found in pigeons, was already closed by Friday morning.
Meanwhile, the Geneva-based World Health Organization (WHO) said there was no sign of a sustained spread of the virus from person to person in China, adding that it is still possible that limited transmission has occurred between people.
However, a Nanjing resident surnamed Zhang said she was worried that her daughter would be exposed to the virus when she goes back to school following the extended holiday for grave-sweeping festival, or Qing Ming.
"We have just had the Qing Ming holiday, but next week they're back at school," Zhang said. "I'm worried my daughter will be infected at school, because the four-year-old in Shanghai who was infected is still in the hospital."
"I plan to keep my child home from school another week, because the incubation period is seven days, then we'll see," she said.
Many under watch
Tests have confirmed the presence of H7N9 in 14 people so far, and around 400 people known to have been in contact with them are under close watch, according to WHO spokesman Gregory Hartl.
"We have 14 cases in a large geographical area, but we have no sign of any epidemiological linkage between the confirmed cases and we have no sign of sustained human-to-human transmission," Hartl told reporters.
"The 400 contacts are being followed up ...There are reports of people or a person with fever," he said.
Shanghai authorities slaughtered more than 20,000 poultry at a wholesale market in the city.
Bird flu is very common among poultry flocks in southern China, and is sometimes transmitted to people and pigs nearby.
However, person-to-person transmission, which could spark a pandemic, is rare, and this still appears to be the case with the H7N9 virus.
One of the people known to be infected is a butcher, while another sells pork products at a market.
Hartl said tests had not so far suggested that tens of thousands of pig carcases dumped into Shanghai's Huangpu river were linked to the bird flu outbreak.
He said Chinese health officials have been "very diligent" in stepping up disease surveillance and in conducting tests on people who have respiratory illnesses of an unknown origin.
Reported by Yang Fan for RFA's Mandarin service, and by Fung Yat-yiu for the Cantonese service. Translated and written in English by Luisetta Mudie.