First patient discharged

First H7N9 patient discharged from hospital
English.news.cn   2013-04-10 15:41:16                   
SHANGHAI, April 10 (Xinhua) -- A four-year-old boy, one of China's 31 patients hospitalized for the H7N9 bird flu infection, was discharged from a Shanghai hospital on Wednesday, after being fully cured.

The boy is the first H7N9 patient to be cured and discharged from hospital. The new strain of bird flu virus has claimed nine lives after the first human infection was discovered on March 1 in Shanghai.

Lu Hongzhou, a professor with the Shanghai Public Health Clinic Center, said clinical observations have found that if a patient can be given H7N9 infection treatment no later than five days after he or she shows flu symptoms, China's current therapeutic methods can be effective in treating the disease.

"Over five days, the patient's visceral organs can be damaged, and the medicines like oseltaminir will have little effect on the patient," Lu said.

Doctors with the Pediatric Hospital affiliated to Fudan University, one of Shanghai's designated hospitals for taking H7N9 patients, said they did not use a large dose of antiviral drugs on the boy in order to minimize the side-effects.

The boy was diagnosed with the bird flu virus infection on April 4, three days after he started suffering from a fever and was admitted into a small hospital. The Pediatric Hospital certified the boy's discharge.

On Wednesday, health authorities in east China's Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces reported three new H7N9 avian influenza infections, updating Tuesday's tally of H7N9 infections to 31 nationwide.

The Jiangsu Provincial Health and Family Planning Commission said two senior men in Wuxi City have been diagnosed with the virus infection, and both are critically ill.

One of the men, surnamed Chen, began suffering from a fever on March 29. The other surnamed Xu started to show pneumonia symptoms last Tuesday.

The health authority has carried out health checks on 31 people who have been in close contact with the patients. None of them have shown any abnormal symptoms.

Another infection was reported in Hangzhou, capital of Zhejiang.

The patient, a 65-year-old farmer, is currently in a stable condition.

The World Health Organization has said there is no evidence H7N9 is passing from person to person.

So far, all cases of the new strain of avian influenza have been detected in Shanghai and the east China provinces of Zhejiang, Jiangsu and Anhui.

http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/china/2013-04/10/c_132298381.htm