Live market chickens have been implicated in the H7N9 outbreak.WIKIMEDIA, THEGREENJOn March 31, Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention announced that scientists had isolated a novel influenza A virus from four patients in eastern China, three of whom had died. As of yesterday (April 25), the confirmed cases in China has risen to 108 including 22 deaths, according to the World Health Organization’s official count, and an additional person in Taiwan who had traveled from China has been diagnosed with the virus, identified as H7N9.
Virologists and epidemiologists worldwide have sprung into action trying to understand and control the outbreak. Chinese researchers have posted the viral sequence in an open-access repository and are sending samples of the live virus to labs around the globe for study.
Encouragingly, H7N9, which has never before infected humans, is not thought to spread readily between people. There have been some clusters of disease among closely related people, but it is unclear whether they resulted from shared exposure to the disease in animals, or very limited human-to-human transmission. Furthermore, the death rate may not be as high as it seems, as milder cases are more likely to go unreported.
But that’s where the good news ends. The virus appears to be more virulent than past ...
