Just when it seemed that the panic over a flu pandemic had subsided, startling news has been announced this week which makes this threat a potent reality: that bird flu, which is rife in the Far East, can be transmitted from one human being to another.
This disturbing development in events has come to the attention of doctors in the case of a 24-year-old man who, having contracted the disease from a poultry market, passed on the disease to his 52-year-old father. The young man died as a result of the disease while his father survived. The fact that the H5N1 strain of bird flu has evolved, and now seems to be able to freely pass between humans could be the birth of a strain of the virus which could infect hundreds of millions of people.
The 24-year-old developed flu symptoms after visiting a poultry market in the Jiangsu Province in China. He suffered fever, chills, a headache, a sore throat and a cough. He was treated with antibiotics but with no success. He died in hospital, five days after he was admitted. His father who, importantly, lived six miles away and never visited the poultry market where his son was infected, fell ill a week after going to visit his son in hospital. He himself had to be admitted and spent over three weeks being treated. He was treated with antivirals and the blood plasma from a woman who had been infected with the same strain of avian flu. He narrowly pulled through.
There is a possibility that the father contracted the disease from another market where it was noted that poultry were being slaughtered. The man maintains, however, that he went nowhere near these birds, which strongly suggests that he caught the avian flu from his son. It is thought that this family may have had a genetic susceptibility to the disease though Wendy Barkley, from Imperial College, London, said that there was no firm evidence to suggest that the H5N1 strain has mutated to allow it to pass from one human being to another.