Hunan Province – Credit Wikipedia
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Today, Hunan Province (not to be confused with Henan Province, which already has four cases) is added to the growing list of places in China where human infections with the H7N9 virus have been confirmed.
This makes the third new province to report human cases over the past three days (along with Jiangxi and Fujian).
This from Xinhua News.
First H7N9 human infection reported in China's Hunan
English.news.cn 2013-04-27 20:01:53
CHANGSHA, April 27 (Xinhua) -- Health authorities in central China's Hunan Province on Saturday confirmed its first human infection case of H7N9 bird flu.
A 64-year-old woman surnamed Guan, a resident in Shaoyang City, started suffering from a fever on April 14, and laboratory tests confirmed her H7N9 infection on Saturday, Hunan Provincial Health Department said in a statement
The statement said Guan had been exposed to poultry four days before she developed the fever. No abnormal symptoms had been found among the 41 people who were in close contact with the patient, it added.
An official with the department said Guan had been critically ill but that her condition was improving.
Although many infections have been linked to exposure to live-market birds, the exact form of `poultry exposure’ for this case isn’t revealed.
In 1997, Hong Kong was able to eradicate the H5N1 virus through a rapid and bold culling of all poultry across Hong Kong’s relatively small 1104 sq km territory.
As the geographic range of this virus increases (Hunan Province alone is nearly 200 times larger than Hong Kong), the prospects of China being able to cull its way out of this zoonotic outbreak grow bleaker.
