# 1427
After 20 days in a hospital, Lu, the father of the young man who died earlier this month from bird flu, was well enough to be released to his family for further care.
While 20 days in the hospital may seem a long time, it actually is about average for a bird flu survivor. A few victims have been released after a week or 10 days, but some require a month or more in the hospital.
Avian Flu isn't your garden variety influenza.
Unfortunately we don't get much detail about the course of treatment, or clinical course of the illness, from the hospitals in countries like China or Indonesia. Autopsies are almost never done in Asian or Moslem countries.
Our knowledge of exactly how the virus attacks the body is limited.
What we do know is that the H5N1 virus appears to attack not just the lungs, but other organs as well.
What we don't know could fill volumes.
Many people are operating under the impression that H5N1 is just a nasty version of regular influenza. That most victims will recover in 7 to 10 days, and be able to return to work.
Maybe. Maybe not.
The track record thus far isn't encouraging.
China's latest bird flu patient discharged from hospital
www.chinaview.cn
2007-12-29 21:23:04
NANJING, Dec. 29 (Xinhua) -- The latest bird flu patient was discharged from an unidentified hospital on Dec. 26 in the eastern province of Jiangsu, local health authorities said.
After being treated for about 20 days, the patient, surnamed Lu, 52, had recovered sufficiently to leave under the care of family members, the Jiangsu Provincial Health Department said.
Lu, father of a young man who died from the H5N1 strain of bird flu in the same city, developed a fever days after his son's death was confirmed as having been from bird flu. Medical experts immediately sent the elder man to a designated hospital for treatment.
Lu's son died on Nov. 2, a couple of days after being diagnosed with "lower left lobe pneumonia" in Nanjing, the capital of Jiangsu. He was the 17th Chinese to die of avian flu since 2003.
He was said to have had no contact with dead poultry and the Jiangsu Animal Husbandry and Veterinary Bureau said no bird flu epidemic had been discovered in the province.
China's health authorities previously said that no human-to-human transmission had been confirmed in the two human cases of bird flu and the means of transmission in these cases, involving the two family members in the Nanjing area, remained unknown.
