A new bird flu H10N8 virus strain has erupted in China, and it has killed one woman in the country.

Xinhua state news agency reported on Wednesday that a 73-year-old woman from China's Jiangxi province died from the new H10N8 avian flu infection, the third of a series of new strains discovered in the country.

The unidentified fatality was admitted to the hospital on Nov 30 with severe pneumonia. She died on Dec 6. None of the people she had been in contact so far had been sick, but are under close medical surveillance, China's National Health and Family Planning Commission said.

Apart from pneumonia, the patient was also diagnosed with high blood pressure, a neuromuscular disorder, and suffered a heart attack.

Before getting sick, relatives said she had recently visited a live poultry market.

"Influenza A(H10) is currently not a local statutorily notifiable infectious disease but the Public Health Laboratory Services Branch of the CHP is capable of detecting this virus by culture or genetic testing. No confirmed human cases have been recorded so far in Hong Kong," a spokesman for Hong Kong's Centre for Health Protection (CHP) said in a statement.

The H10N8 strain has been detected in Chinese birds as early as June 2012, based on a report released by Chinese researchers in the same month in the Journal of Virology. In the report, Chinese researchers said they had detected the H10N8 strain in a live-bird market, in Guangdong province.

However, a May 2012 report published in Emerging Infectious Diseases revealed that two Australian abattoir workers tested positive for H10 after processed chickens from a farm that suffered from an H10N7 outbreak in 2010. The two workers only had minor symptoms.

Hong Kong travelers have been advised not to visit live-poultry markets, and to refrain having direct contact with poultry, birds, and their droppings as well.

Jiangxi is located in southeastern China. Guangdong province separates China from Hong Kong.