Two men in Shanghai are the first humans to die from H7N9, a strain of bird flu that has previously not been reported affecting humans, said Chinese authorities on Sunday.
According to the Associated Press, China's National Health and Family Planning Commission reports a third person who has been infected and is in critical condition in the province of Anhui nearby.
It is still unclear how the three were infected with the virus, but there was no sign that the three had contracted the virus from each other. Furthermore, there is no sign of infection in the 88 people who had the closest contact with them, according to Chinese authorities.
"There is apparently no evidence of human-to-human transmission, and transmission of the virus appears to be inefficient, therefore the risk to public health would appear to be low," said the World Health Organization's regional spokesperson Timothy O'Leary to the Associated Press. The agency will continue to closely monitor the situation in China.
Of the two men who have died from H7N9, one was 87 and the other was 27. The 87 year old became ill on Feb. 19 and died 12 days later. The 27 year-old became ill on Feb. 27 and died less than a week later, on March 4.
The much more virulent bird flu strain, H5N1 (pictured above), caused panic beginning in 2003, when it decimated animal populations in some countries and infected hundreds of people. According to the World Health Organization's report this year, since 2003, the H5N1 bird flu has infected over 600 people and killed more than half of those infected, 371.
The most deadly and virulent form of flu ever known, the "Spanish Flu," was a global pandemic, spreading around the world in 1918, infecting as many as half a billion people, and killing tens of millions of people - about 3 to 5 percent of the world's population at the time.
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