# 1449
Six weeks ago a 24-year-old man from Jiangsu Province, surnamed Lu, died from the H5N1 virus. The next day, his father became ill, and would spend the next 20 days in the hospital, diagnosed with bird flu.
On December 10th, we got this statement from the Chinese Ministry of Health:
OFFICIALS confirmed that the bird flu virus that killed a man and infected his father in Jiangsu Province was a "poultry-originated virus" and cannot spread from person to person, Mao Qun'an, spokesman of the Ministry of Health
Still, the delay in onset of symptoms between the son and his father bespoke a different reality, and questions continued to be raised. Two days later, we were treated to the `Beggars Chicken' explanation, which while tortured and convoluted, certainly got high marks for originality.
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.
All neat and tidy, as long as you ignore the fact that two of the four people who consumed the chicken didn't become ill. 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.
A happy ending, except almost nobody believed it.
Today China is admitting what almost every one else who followed this story suspected from the start; that this case involved human-to-human transmission.
They are quick to point out, however, that the virus has not mutated.
This from Xinhua News.
Father in bird flu case infected through contact with ill son
(Xinhua)
Updated: 2008-01-10 15:35BEIJING - Health authorities confirmed here on Thursday that the latest human case of bird flu in the eastern province of Jiangsu, which involved a 52-year-old father, came from close contact with his infected son and not a viral mutation.
The World Health Organization has warned that the virus that causes the illness - if given sufficient opportunity - would mutate into a form that is highly infectious and easily transmissible from person to person. Such a change could start a global outbreak.
However, this case - although it involved the disease apparently passing from one person to another - does not exactly fit the profile of an infectious human-to-human outbreak, and it has remained something of a puzzle.
"It has no biological features for human-to-human transmission, " said Mao Qun'an, Health Ministry spokesman. An epidemiological investigation showed the father was infected through close contact with his son, he said.
The cases took place in the provincial capital, Nanjing. The son, 24, and the first to be infected, died on December 2. The father was later confirmed to be infected with the H5N1 virus, which causes bird flu.
At the time, the ministry said experts had found that the virus that infected the son had originated with poultry and had not mutated. But it remained unclear how the son was infected in the first place, as neither man had any known contact with dead poultry - the primary known source of the ailment for humans.
The young man, surnamed Lu, developed fever, chills and other symptoms on November 24 and was hospitalized on November 27 after being diagnosed with lower left lobe pneumonia. His father developed a fever and was hospitalized for lower lobe pneumonia on December 3, the day after his son's death.
"The father has recovered," Mao said, adding that the cases have been effectively contained.
Local authorities had kept 83 people who had close contact with either man under close observation but none had shown unusual symptoms so far, according to the ministry.
The case of the Lu family, although unusual, is not the only one of its kind. Reuters reported last month that a similar case occurred in Pakistan.
The latest cases bring the number of confirmed human infections of bird flu in China to 27 since 2003, with 17 deaths.
Bird flu, or Avian influenza, is a contagious disease of animal origin caused by viruses that normally infect only birds and, less commonly, pigs.
We've seen probable H2H transmission in Indonesia, Thailand, Pakistan, and very likely Turkey as well. It isn't all that uncommon.
Well, we can now add China to the list.
Fortunately, it still appears to require close contact with an infected person for the virus to make the leap from one person to another. Avian flu remains difficult to catch. The virus hasn't yet learned how to spread efficiently.
Hopefully it never will.
But hope is not a plan. With every new human infection the virus gets another chance to mutate and to learn new tricks.
We need to be ready if that day ever comes.
