Sunday 29 December 2013

Influenza A(H7N9) virus case accumulation for 2013...

Click on image to enlarge.
Sure a full 12-months of H7N9 in humans hasn't passed yet, but 2013 is coming to a close. 

I have 148 H7N9 cases worldwide including deaths and the asymptomatic boy from Beijing who seems to still be off the official tallies for some reason. WHO have not had an official tally of fatal cases in their recent 2 disease outbreak news posts, the last with a tally was 6-Nov in which 45 deaths were recorded with 6 cases remaining in hospital and 88 having been discharged. Hong Kong's Centre for Health Protection (CHP) maintains a running tally of mainland China cases With the recent death of a Hong Kong man the tally of fatal cases rest around 46 (PFC of 31.1%).

I've just changed my spreadsheet to a weekly format from the daily version and the first chart it reveals is shown above. 

This includes the lay of the land for all H7N9 cases from the beginning of the outbreak, 11-Feb (date of pneumonia for son of index case), through to 29-Dec. Date data employ dates of reporting if no date of illness onset could be found.

We can see from this 47-week inclusive dataset that the principle period of activity was in late March to late April. Whether that will also be the case in the new year is anyone's guess really.

What we can say from the vast amount of influenza virus research data in the scientific literature, is that each and every new combination of 8 gene segments that comprise a distinct influenza A virus seem capable of their own distinct "personality".

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