# 1338
Pro-Med Mail has published a translation of a long article from a Chinese source that purports to explain just how the son, and then the father, from Jiangsu Province, became infected with H5N1.
The link, to read the entire translation, is here.
Pro-Med Mail, by the way, is the premier reporting service of the International Society For Infectious Diseases, and does a great job of disseminating information on all sorts of pathogens.
Rather than reprint the entire translation, I'll summarize. But by all means, read the entire article.
The `story' goes like this.
- The son, his parents, and his girlfriend all went out to dinner a couple of days prior to his falling ill, and feasted on Beggar's Chicken, a local dish where a chicken is slow roasted inside a shell of mud or clay.
- The son reportedly had been bitten by the girlfriend's dog 20 days earlier, and was undergoing a series of rabies shots at the time. This, the article suggests, is why his immune system was weakened and he fell ill before his father.
- Two days after the son died, the father went into the hospital, but the story states he'd delayed seeking treatment for several days.
- The intimation is that this shared chicken dish was the source of the H5N1 infection.
- And it does sorta blow the whole idea that infected chicken, once cooked, is safe to eat. But that little problem is simply waved away by suggesting the chicken was undercooked inside it's mud shell.
The translation concludes with this snippet.
The odd thing is that although 4 people went to eat chicken [at the temple], only the 2 men fell ill and the 2 women are well. Reports say that [the] girlfriend ate a lot of chicken but is perfectly fine.
Sources say that [the 24-year-old's mother] also has no similar symptoms but has been isolated for observation. Her cell phone is turned off and there is no contact with the outside world.
Like the summation to a drawing room murder mystery, this seems to wrap up all of the untidy details. As long as you ignore the lack of illness among the two other diners that evening.
It explains the gap in the onset of illness between the son and father (two ways, in fact. Impaired immune system of the son due to rabies shots, and a failure to report to the hospital when illness first struck for the father), and in the end, it lays the blame on a chicken.
In other words, a happy ending, epidemiologically speaking. No worries about this being a H2H (Human to Human) transmission.
But it all hinges on one unproven assumption: That the dish shared by the father, son, mother, and girlfriend was the source of the infection.
But other than that one pesky detail, it's a great theory.
It might even be right.
But it seems a stretch.
