As the number of deaths due to the new avian influenza A (H7N9) reached seven in China, a member of the country's People's Liberation Army (PLA) has said the current health scare now gripping the world's second-largest economy is but a scheme planted by the United States.

This, as a four-year-old boy recovered from the symptoms of the new avian influenza A (H7N9) disease.

Dai Xu, senior colonel with the People's Liberation Army's air force and lecturer at the National Defence University, on his Sina Weibo microblog on Saturday, called the current avian flu outbreak scare in China an American conspiracy.

"The national leadership should not pay too much attention to it," Mr Dai wrote. "Or else, it'll be like in 2003 with Sars!"

On Tuesday, the death tally brought by the new avian influenza A (H7N9) hit seven in China. The latest fatality was a 64-year-old man in Shanghai who died in a local hospital on Sunday.

The number of infected have likewise risen to 24 cases.

The boy who recovered was still being kept in the Children's Hospital for further observation. So far, his temperature was normal and has no respiratory symptoms.

"From a clinical point of view, the boy has recovered," Wu Fan, director of the Shanghai disease control and prevention centre said, stressing that not every human infected of the new avian influenza A (H7N9) is serious.

Mr Dai said the new avian influenza A (H7N9) was a "bio-psychological weapon" the US was thrusting against China.

"At that time, America was fighting in Iraq and feared that China would take advantage of the opportunity to take other actions," he wrote. "This is why they used bio-psychological weapons against China. All of China fell into turmoil and that was exactly what the US wanted. Now, the US is using the same old trick. China should have learned its lesson and should calmly deal with the problem."

But not all of China's netizens agreed with his perspective.

"Mr Dai must step down and apologise to the families of the deceased," Luo Changping, deputy editor of the financial magazine Caijing, commented. "I'm confident that the vast majority of soldiers would not endorse this."

"In that case, the invention of cars by the U.S. and Germany must have been an ever greater conspiracy," Kai-fu Lee, former head of Google China and likewise one of the most influential voices on Weibo, replied.

The World Health Organisation, in a joint press conference with China's health ministry in Beijing on Monday, said evidence have yet to surface that the virus made a human-to-human transmission.

"The recent reports from China are the first cases of human infection with H7N9 viruses. Although we do not yet know the source of infection, at this time there is no evidence of sustained human-to-human transmission," Michael O'Leary from WHO said.

"We know at this point that, in the human cases we know, the disease is very serious and a large percentage of cases have died -- or a substantial percentage have died and others are critically ill."

"Some of the confirmed cases had contact with animals or with environments in which animals were located. The virus has been found in a pigeon in a market in Shanghai. These events gave possibility of animal-to-human transmission, for which investigations continue."

Read more:

China Bird Flu Pandemic: China's Stocks Down as Number of Infected Rises to 21

China Bird Flu Pandemic: 5 Dead, US Prepares Vaccine Against Avian Influenza A (H7N9)

China Bird Flu Pandemic: Deaths Now at 3, Number of Infected Rises to 9, Virus Could Transfer from Poultry to Other Mammals

China Bird Flu Pandemic: WHO Tells the World Not to Panic as Number of Infected Rises