For Chinese citizens who have not traveled abroad or to provinces with A/H1N1 cases, can they continue normal activities if they develop fevers?

Individuals should stay away from crowds to avoid the possibility of infecting others with this contagious disease. I suggest that people with cold symptoms should take a rest at home. They should go to a hospital when symptoms become serious.

Hospitals are not conducting virus tests for every patient with a fever. Could we miss such cases?

Yes, we could. But now all the cases we have are imported and we are spotting them at our ports. However, if China's situation becomes like Japan and the United States, then our focus will not be on finding individual cases. At present, our medical institutions have taken other measures by asking patients whether they have traveled abroad. That's how we know that our current A/H1N1 cases are imported.

China's national disease control network, put in place during the 2003 severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) outbreak, is 6 years old. Do you think it can pass this new test?

We have established a national contagious disease prevention network since the SARS outbreak, which has basically covered every corner of China. All contagious diseases are quickly reported to the Ministry of Health. This system's effectiveness has been tested.

China's A/H1N1 cases so far have been reported through this system. Over the past few years, we have been gradually setting up a national network of influenza labs to prevent epidemics of this sort. These labs have the capacity to conduct tests on the virus. There are now 84 labs in this national network, which have played an important role in confirming the three cases. All the confirmed cases we have found were first reported by provincial and city disease prevention authorities, which sent virus samples to the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention for confirmation.

I don't think this network is fully capable of helping China weather the growing outbreak of A/H1N1 since it is not fully formed. The network's coverage is still limited. It covers less than 20 percent of China's prefecture-level cities, where local disease prevention authorities are able to conduct tests for A/H1N1 virus. Next we need to equip all disease prevention authorities at the prefecture-level with the capacity to test for A/H1N1 so that we can better fight the disease.