The Frightening Story Of A Man Who Bought A Chicken And Then Died Of Bird Flu

REUTERS/Carlos BarriaChickens are pictured on the floor of a food market in downtown Shanghai, April 5, 2013. Chinese authorities slaughtered over 20,000 birds at a poultry market in Shanghai on Friday as the death toll from a new strain of bird flu mounted to six, spreading concern overseas and sparking a sell-off in airline shares in Europe and Hong Kong. All the 14 reported infections from the H7N9 bird flu strain have been in eastern China and at least four of the dead are in Shanghai. Twenty days after visiting the poultry market, Hongming was dead.

He had been infected with the new bird flu virus, first reported in Shanghai, called H7N9.

Hongming was known patient number 8. He worked in Jiangsu Province, China. He was 38 years old and the fifth person to die of the new virus.

Sharon Sanders, Editor-in-Chief and President of FluTrackers — where a full list of flu cases is available — recreated the timeline of his illness from the story originally told in Chinese by Wei Chen Xiaoyan Zhao of China Economic Net.