It's very early Monday morning in China, and I don't know when we'll get more news on the two new H5N1 cases in Guizhou. But I've done a quick check of my own site and found two earlier reports of human H5N1 in that province.
The first case fell ill on January 15, 2009 and two weeks later was reported to be recovering. The second case was just a year ago; he fell ill on January 6, 2012, and died on January 22. It's interesting that both cases occurred near the lunar new year, like today's.
According to the Hong Kong Centre for Disease Prevention, these two will be the 44th and 45th H5N1 cases in China. There were 2 last year (including the fatal Guizhou case), 1 case (fatal) in 2011, and 2 cases (1 fatal) in 2010. In 2009 China had 7 cases, 4 of them fatal.
Unlike the Cambodian cases, neither of the new patients is said to have been contact with poultry, and the reports say the cases are not related. I hope we'll get some kind of epidemiological analysis (or at least some informed speculation) on how these two persons might have contracted one of the rarest diseases in the world at the same time and in the same region.
Pandemic Information News, meanwhile, has a computer-translated Chinese report on these two cases and saying a third person in Guizhou contracted H5N1 in December and died of it.
