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Before Thanksgiving, the Chinese government announced that it had confirmed the first three cases of bird flu in people.

This announcement came as quite a surprise. But not for the reason you might expect.

The advent of bird flu in people is not novel. Over the last two years, four other countries - Cambodia, Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam - have already confirmed more than 100 cases of bird flu in people.

What was surprising about this announcement was the country that made it.

China's handling of these new cases of bird flu differed markedly from how it dealt with SARS (sudden acute respiratory syndrome) in 2003. When cases of that then-mysterious illness arose in southeastern Chinese provinces, provincial governments concealed the news for four months.

Chinese officials apparently believed that they could simply make the virus disappear by denying its existence. Or they at least imagined that their silence would deaden the virus's negative impact on the country's economy and tourist trade.

They were wrong on both counts. The country's economy and tourist trade both took big hits, and SARS spread through the country not in spite of - but largely because of - the Chinese government's failure to acknowledge and confront the outbreak.

Happily, it seems that China has learned a lesson from the SARS debacle. Having seen the failure of the speak-no-evil approach, it has embraced the only model that can help us beat back an avian flu pandemic: the forthright sharing of all information, good or bad.

When reports began circulating this October of unknown illnesses in central China and provincial officials seemed reluctant to investigate, Beijing stepped in immediately. National officials contacted the World Health Organization and requested help, and it also sent in teams of investigators.

The investigators confirmed three cases of infection with the H5N1 strain of the bird flu virus. But the good news is that - as with all the cases so far in other countries - investigators did not find any evidence of person-to-person transmission.

In other words, each infected individual likely contracted the illness from a bird. And none of them appeared to have been infected with a strain that they passed on to other people.

To date, bird flu has proved much more lethal than the garden- variety influenza we see each winter. It has killed roughly half the people it's infected, as opposed to the typical winter flu mortality rate of under 1 percent.

If a strain of bird flu emerges that can be passed from person to person, millions could perish. We would need to isolate and sequence the flu strain to develop vaccines and treatments, and while we were doing that, we would need to prevent infected individuals from spreading the disease worldwide. Our only hope of preventing a pandemic would lie in our ability to share information quickly and transparently with other governments.

A bird flu pandemic is far from a fait accompli. As China's latest actions demonstrate, everyone is taking this threat seriously. And the more serious we are about stopping bird flu, the more likely we are to be successful.

J. Donald Capra is president of the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation. He can be reached at JDonald-Capra@omrf.ouhsc.edu.