Son Infects Father with H5N1 in China’s Jiangsu Province

Health officials in Beijing confirmed a man who was the latest to be diagnosed with human bird flu, got the dreaded H5N1 virus from his 24-year-old son. The 52-year old man hailed from Jiangsu province, the authorities said.

Investigators are still trying to determine how the son contracted the disease, given the fact that neither the father nor the son had any previous contact with poultry, according to a report by Xinhua, the Chinese government’s official news agency.

Both the son and the father lived in Nanjing, the capital of Jiangsu province. The father recovered from the disease, while the son was not so lucky, succumbing to the disease early December.

What has been especially puzzling for investigators is the possible method of transmission. Addressing a routine press conference, Ministry of Health spokesman Mao Qun’an said the investigators initially believed it to be a case of ‘an infection through close contact.’

However, there has been no mutation of the virus detected. Experts say the virus detected in both cases was the type that affected birds, not humans. There were also no biological features that could possibly enable human-to-human transmission of the virus, Mao said.

Mao went on to say that not one among the 82 people with whom the father-son duo had close contact had been diagnosed with the virus. Mao had also set aside concerns of a possible mutation in the virus last month. That was when the father, with the surname Lu, was admitted to hospital and diagnosed with the H5N1 strain, just after his son’s death on December 2.

Elaborating further, Mao said the primary source of human infection so far has been determined to be contact with sick birds, and yet neither of the two had any contact with such birds.

There already is a warning from the World Health Organization that the virus strain could possibly mutate into a strain that could be easily transmitted from human to human, a scary scenario that could trigger a worldwide pandemic. Mao said this case did not fit that profile.

According to Dr. Hans Troedsson, the WHO’s China representative, the virus has not achieved the capability to transmit from one human to another. Speaking to the China Daily, Dr. Troedsson said, “The virus can still not be transmitted from human to human efficiently.” Dr. Troedsson has not yet ruled out the possibility of transmission from animals to humans.

In the course of his press conference, Mao also said this was not the only such instance in China, though he refused to shed any further light on his statement. A similar case was reported last month in Pakistan, apparently.

With this, the total number of human infections in China stands now at 27 since 2003, of whom 17 have succumbed. Avian influenza originates in animals, most commonly in birds, and to a certain extent, in pigs.

A release last month from the Ministry of Agriculture had said there was a very high possibility of bird flu infections regionally in winter and spring.