Now - it's another year later.
While we have studied, written, read and learned much, much more about this emerging respiratory virus than we have about the Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus - even after its 3 years among us - we are still watching a new outbreak of human H7N9 cases spread across China.
Each year more provinces are added to the list to report human infections - more infections likely go unnoticed, unrecorded and/or unreported. Gaps in the reporting is not unexpected and not unusual.
Each outbreak with its accompanying economic damage, financial losses, human illness and death is because of the desire to maintain a tradition, namely the consumption of freshly extinguished poultry.
We're really good at getting ourselves into pickles. And we seem to be doomed to repeat the patterns, playing catchup and never getting in front of our new and emerging infectious diseases problems. And each time we seem amazed at what we learn, but really, we learn the same thing over, and over and over again. Eventually we'll run out of infectious threats I guess.
Or they'll run out of hosts in which to incubate in and spread from.
Happy Lunar New Year.
