Sunday, 19 February 2017

H7N9 in humans - biggest ever season in humans - most poorly reported as well

UPDATE: No.1 20FEB2017
Below is the best I can do to plot avian influenza H7N9) virus cases in humans against month.

And just to be clear - it's a very big underestimation. WHO is reporting 1,222 cases in humans [3] - but patchy public data exist for about 1,000.

Click on image to enlarge.
NOTE: This is a big underestimate as it only includes cases
with public detail available to identify them. There are 
approximately 200 cases missing. 
Ideally the charts above woudl be based on the month that illness onset occurred - when each person became ill. But those details just are not publicly forthcoming from China's massive human and animal influenza surveillance and testing system. 

I'm sure the data are to hand internally, and they may be on hand at the World Health Organization (WHO) - but you wouldn't know it by looking for them publicly. 

The WHO used to be helpful with providing H7N9 data but it seems their latest efforts to provide more detail on MERS cases has exhausted them.

Hong Kong's Centre for Health Protection (CHP) has been valiantly chipping away, but they also fail to provide sufficient detail to link cases with media or other reports. What they do provide are summary totals.

As for fatal outcomes from H7N9 infection - forget understanding who dies when and why. Those numbers have been frankly a pathetic mess for four years.

This week marked the fourth anniversary of our knowledge of H7N9 in humans - the first case became ill February 18th 2013 in as part of a Shanghai family cluster. Since then we've seen less and less detail on cases. And by "detail" I don't mean their names and addresses - just case age, sex, date of illness onset/hospitalization/death, linkage between case and death, poultry or human contact and place infection was likely acquired. Basic and standard stuff.

Meanwhile the mainstream media report every bolus of data that are dumped as if these were new cases and deaths that have just occurred. In reality, the huge January spike below may include many cases and deaths from a month or more earlier. It may mis many cases that have not been detected.

We're definitely having a huge H7N9 season in 2016/17 (n=176 human cases using public case data, but over 400 based on announced totals[3]). We had bigger detailed tallies in 2014 (n=326) and 2015 (n=220), but never a season as big as these totals make it out to be now. 

This is the largest H7N9 season ever recorded.

In media interviews over the past weeks, I've put the current season down to lethargy in closing live bird markets as cases and deaths have mounted. The response has been faster in previous years.[1,2] Poultry is a big deal in China.[2] Perhaps the poultry lobby has won out over human life this season. 

  1. Amended to indicate the scale of the case numbers, based on totals, not individual detailed cases, in the 2016/17 seasons. The largest season of H7N9 in humans...on record.
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