Blog 8: China Announces 4 New Flu Cases

            I am sure many people remember the 2009 H1N1 pandemic. That was a respiratory illness found in pigs. There are many strains of swine flu, all of which can be dangerous. On Tuesday, China announced that four more people had been infected with a new strain of bird flu. This same strain was believed to have killed two Shanghai residents last month and left one in critical condition. The two who died were both male ages 27 and 87, while the critically ill patient was a 35 year old woman. All three were from the Shanghai area. The four reported on Tuesday were all from Jiangsu Province, just in different cities. Of the four, three are female and one is male and they range from ages 32 to 83. Two of them even began developing flu symptoms on March 19^th. This strain of bird flu is identified as H7N9. It had not been found in humans until the Shanghai case. A strain from 2003, H5N1, killed hundreds of people in Asia and led to the deaths of tens of millions of birds. This specific case was troubling because there is no vaccine for the H7N9 strain. One of the four infected with the H7N9 strain is a poultry butcher and in past strains, the cases involved infected poultry. A random fact the article brought up was that around the same time the new four cases came up, 15,000 dead pigs were found in the Huangpu River. There was no link found between this and the H7N9 strain but the explanation has still not been found.

            Any kind of influenza is nothing to joke around with but with all the new strains coming out, it is important to keep up with the news and pay attention during flu seasons. It is more common in Asian populations but that doesn’t mean it won’t affect others.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/03/world/asia/china-announces-new-flu-cases.html?_r=0

04/02/13

6:00 PM