IF I WERE a conspiracy theorist, I would hardly be able to contain myself.

As a rule, I’m not — but I might make an exception for something I have been keeping tabs on for the past fortnight. This curious tale involves the death of a holidaymaker in China, an international medical journal and a mysterious e-mail whose authorship is yet to be determined.

Two weeks ago, as usual, the New England Journal of Medicine circulated its contents list a few days ahead of publication. One letter in the June 22 edition merited further inspection: Fatal Infection with Influenza A (H5N1) in China. At first glance it appeared that Dr Qing-Yu Zhu and Dr Wu-Chun Cao, from the State Key Laboratory of Pathogens and Biosecurity in Beijing, plus six other authors, were simply reporting another death from bird flu. This wasn’t quite the case. They were reporting a death that happened in 2003. A 24-year-old man from Hong Kong had fallen ill while on a visit to mainland China and died four days after admission to hospital. The Beijing scientists were now saying he’d died from H5N1, not Sars, as originally suspected.

This is significant because China reported its first outbreak of H5N1 to the World Health Organisation two years later, in late 2005. The discrepancy in timelines means that the avian flu virus could have been circulating for two years in China before the alarm was raised. The country dithered similarly during the Sars outbreak; China promised such a delay would never happen again.

The Beijing scientists also gave warning that their genetic sequencing of the virus showed it to be a vicious hotchpotch of H5N1 viruses isolated from chickens in different regions of China. This, they said, would have implications for vaccine design: any vaccine would need to combine viruses from different geographical areas.

Startling stuff. Then, a day before publication, the NEJM received an e-mail purporting to come from one of the authors, Dr Cao, asking that the letter be withdrawn. The journal replied that it was too late and that the edition had already been printed; nonetheless, the editors posted notice of the withdrawal on its website and said they were investigating. The journal then tried to contact the Chinese team to find out why they were retracting.

You know what? Dr Cao says the e-mail never came from him, and he has since sent a signed document to the NEJM confirming this. He added that he and his colleagues absolutely stood by the letter.

The WHO has asked for an urgent meeting with the Chinese about exactly when the H5N1 tests were carried out (the NEJM letter doesn’t say, and the journal’s reviewers should have corrected the omission). “We would like more details as to the man’s illness, the possible source of infection, whether any of his contacts were symptomatic, and the exact tests carried out,” says Roy Wadia, the WHO’s man in Beijing.

Still, that mysterious e-mail achieved something. A retraction from a scientific journal smells of either impropriety or incompetence, and, accordingly, every British newspaper steered clear of the story. By the time the cloud of doubt had been lifted, the news agenda had moved on. Which meant that the discovery that China had a case of bird flu two years before it said it did went almost unnoticed.

• MALCOLM WICKS, the Energy Minister, made waves for all the wrong reasons on a bobbing Thames riverboat last week when he addressed the fledgling marine renewables industry (which exploits wave and tidal power). To the irritation of the green lobby, he sidestepped the issue of whether nuclear power would make a comeback.

  Further ripples of dismay were felt at Wicks’s lack of interest in a strategic environmental assessment (SEA). Before marine power installations become part of the coastal landscape, their environmental impact must be calculated via an SEA. This calculation is expected to take around four years.

  Surprisingly, Wicks saw no need for the process to begin before 2008, when a new Marine Bill is likely to become law. Stephen Tindale, of Greenpeace, said he found Wicks’ comments, and the prospect of a delay, “alarming”. The minister then confirmed his landlubber credentials by abandoning ship before the cruise and canapés.

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