By Jason Gale - Apr 11, 2013 7:38 AM ET
Bird flu turned fatal for a 52- year-old Shanghai woman whose lungs became so damaged that she began to suffocate, causing her vital organs to rapidly shut down, doctors in China said.
The retiree became ill March 27, with a fever that soared as high as 40.6 degrees Celsius (105.1 Fahrenheit), doctors at Huashan Hospital in Shanghai wrote in a report on the case in the journal Emerging Microbes & Infections. Treatment with intravenous antibiotics, steroids, antibody therapy, and mechanical ventilation failed to help, and she died April 3.
April 9 (Bloomberg) -- Malik Peiris, professor of medical science at the University of Hong Kong’s School of Public Health, talks about the outbreak of deadly bird flu in China. He speaks with Susan Li on Bloomberg Television's "First Up." (Source: Bloomberg)
April 8 (Bloomberg) -- Gregory Hartl, a spokesman for the World Health Organization, discusses the outbreak of H7N9 avian influenza in China. He speaks from Geneva with Francine Lacqua and Guy Johnson on Bloomberg Television's "The Pulse." (Source: Bloomberg)
Her illness, the first H7N9 avian influenza case to be described in a medical journal, highlights the seriousness of the new strain, which has sickened at least 35 people in eastern China, killing 10, in the past two months. Hospital doctors didn’t know the cause of the woman’s illness when she was admitted. Tests identified the H7N9 virus after she died.
“What they had here was a seriously ill patient and they didn’t know what was going on,” said Dominic Dwyer, director of the Institute of Clinical Pathology and Medical Research at Sydney’s Westmead Hospital, who reviewed the case report. “This person was so ill, they just threw everything” at her.
More than two dozen cases have been reported since the woman’s death, spurring heightened vigilance for the new strain, which the World Health Organization said doesn’t appear to be spreading from person to person.
Anti-flu Drugs
“All fatal cases in Shanghai, including this patient, were admitted to hospital very late until the symptom of shortness of breath developed,” Feifei Yang and colleagues at Huashan Hospital wrote in the journal.
Without knowing the cause of their disease, the patients weren’t offered anti-flu drugs, such as Roche Holding AG’s (ROG) Tamiflu, that might have helped them fight the virus, especially if taken within the first few days of their illness, the authors said.
The woman began experiencing fevers and chills on March 27. After several days, she developed a cough, tightness in her chest and difficulty breathing. A chest X-ray showed severe pneumonitis and she was given antibiotics. Her condition worsened and a week after her symptoms began, she was hospitalized for acute respiratory distress syndrome and died the next day.
Blood tests showed cardiac enzymes that suggest the patient had a heart attack, Dwyer said, referring to the published case report. Her heart complications may have been caused by the virus directly or the effects of “trying to push blood through a very heavily congested lung,” he said.
“This is what happens with severe influenza, even if it doesn’t go outside the lung,” Dwyer said. “The big question here is, are these severe cases the tip of a very big iceberg or do most cases get really ill like this?’
To contact the reporter on this story: Jason Gale in Melbourne at j.gale@bloomberg.net
