A case report of avian influenza H7N9 killing a young doctor in Shanghai, China

BMC Infectious Diseases

Case Report

Chwan-Chuen King¹  Hong Zhang²  Shenghua Mao³  Hao Pan³  Xi Zhang³  Jiayu Hu³  Jian Chen³  Yaxu Zheng³  Qichao Pan³  Zheng Teng³  Fan Wu³ 

[1]College of Public Health, National Taiwan University, 100, Taipei, Taiwan

[2]Department of Infectious Disease Control and Prevention, Pudong District Center for Disease Control and Prevention, No 3039, ZhangYang Road, 200136, Shanghai, China

[3]Department of Infectious Disease Control and Prevention, Shanghai Municipal Center for Disease Control and Prevention, No 1380, West Zhongshan Road, 200336, Shanghai, China

关键词: Avian influenza H7N9;    Live-poultry market;    Healthcare workers;    Preventive measures;    Public health policies;   

DOI  :  10.1186/s12879-015-0970-4

 received in 2014-11-24, accepted in 2015-05-29,  发布年份 2015

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundThe novel avian influenza H7N9 virus has caused severe diseases in humans in eastern China since the spring of 2013. On January 18th 2014, a doctor working in the emergency department of a hospital in Shanghai died of H7N9 virus infection. To understand possible reasons to explain this world’s first fatal H7N9 case of a health care worker (HCW), we summarize the clinical presentation, epidemiological investigations, laboratory results, and prevention and control policies and make important recommendations to hospital-related workers.Case presentationThe patient was a 31-year-old male Chinese surgeon who was obese and had a five-year history of hypertension and suspected diabetes. On January 11th 2014, he showed symptoms of an influenza-like illness. Four days later, his illness rapidly progressed with bilateral pulmonary infiltration, hypoxia and lymphopenia. On January 17th, the case had a high fever, productive cough, chest tightness and shortness of breath, so that he was administered with oseltamivir, glucocorticoid, immunoglobulin, and broad-spectrum antibiotic therapy. The case died in the early morning of next day after invasive ventilation. He had no contact with poultry nor had he visited live-poultry markets (LPMs), where positive rates of H7N9 were 14.6 % and 18.5 %. Before his illness, he cared for three febrile patients and had indirect contact with one severe pneumonia patient. Follow-up with 35 close contacts identified two HCWs who had worked also in emergency department but had not worn masks were anti-H7N9-positive. Viral sequence identity percentages between the patient and two LPM-H7N9 isolates were fewer than between the patient and another human case in shanghai in January of 2014.ConclusionsImportant reasons for the patient’s death might include late treatment with oseltamivir, and the infected H7N9 virus carrying both mammalian-adapted signature (HA-Q226L) and aerosol transmissibility (PB2-D701N). The LPM he passed every day was an unlikely source of his infection, but a contaminated environment, or an unidentified mild/asymptomatic H7N9 carrier were more probable. We advocate rigorous standard operating procedures for infection control practices in hospital settings and evaluations thereafter.

【 授权许可】

Unknown   
© Pan et al. 2015. This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.