Credit: Reuters
Via Xinhua, a January 31 report: China confirms new human H7N9 case. Excerpt and then a comment:
One new human H7N9 case has been confirmed in east China's Jiangsu Province, the provincial health department said on Friday.
The patient. a 75-year-old woman from the provincial capital of Nanjing, is in critical condition, the department said in a statement.
The new case brought the number of infections in the province this year to 8 this year.
H7N9 bird flu has killed 19 in China this year, and the total number of human infections had reached 96 as of Monday, according to the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention.
Li Lanjuan, researcher at the Chinese Academy of Engineering and a specialist in H7N9 prevention, said so far there have not been any cases in which one person transmits the flu to another, and the latter transmits the virus to a third person.
Her team has identified H7N9 virus mutations this year, but the mutations are not large-scale.
"Inter-human transmission is very unlikely," said Li, who added that the virus has not evolved to be extensively drug resistant.
Thanks to just under 100 cases of a new strain of influenza, identified in one month, a nation comprising one-seventh of all the human beings on the planet faces a serious medical, economic, and political crisis.
Countless young, well-trained medical experts are trying to understand this latest variation on an old scourge. Scores of millions of households that depend on the poultry trade are facing ruin. A government that emerged from war and more revolutions than it wants to think about, and lifted untold millions out of poverty, must must now confront a virus that tends to kill old people who have survived all the upheavals of the past 70 years.
Let us hope that the billionaires now ruling the People's Republic have the brains and political wisdom to deal with this stupid little virus. What happens in China now happens to all of us.
