Much Higher Case-fatality Rates of Index Cases. Commentary: Differences in the Epidemiology of Human Cases of Avian Influenza A(H7N9) and A(H5N1) Viruses Infection.

Xiaodong Zhang

doi:10.3389/fpubh.2016.00116

Abstract

Much Higher Case-fatality Rates of Index Cases. Commentary: Differences in the Epidemiology of Human Cases of Avian Influenza A(H7N9) and A(H5N1) Viruses Infection.

Highlights

Specialty section: This article was submitted to Infectious Diseases, a section of the journal Frontiers in Public Health
In order to examine whether the individual characteristics of cluster cases are systematically different from other cases, they compared cluster secondary cases with the combined group of sporadic cases and the index case of each cluster, as the authors thought that index case in each cluster was essentially detected in the same way as sporadic human cases
Cluster index case is the initial patient in each cluster after all and ought to be differentiated from sporadic cases when examining the possible differences in the characteristics between sporadic cases and cluster cases, in the event that index cases possess distinctive features

Summary

Introduction

Specialty section: This article was submitted to Infectious Diseases, a section of the journal Frontiers in Public Health. I read with great interest the article by Qin et al for their systematic study on the comparison of characteristics (e.g., median age and case fatality risk) of sporadic and cluster cases of human H5N1 and H7N9 viruses infection [4].

Results

Conclusion