THE first person to fall ill was a 37-year-old woman who sold fruits and chillies at a market in northern Sumatra, Indonesia, in late April. Days later, her two sons and brother also developed symptoms of H5N1 bird flu, followed by her sister, the sister's baby, her second brother and his son.
As is typical with such clusters of people who have got H5N1, only blood relatives got sick, not spouses or relatives by marriage. Now the first confirmation of how H5N1 kills people also suggests why these people may be genetically more susceptible to the virus.
Menno de Jong of the University of Oxford Research Unit in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, and his colleagues studied tissue samples from 18 people in Vietnam who had H5N1, 13 of whom had died. The dead had heavier loads of the virus in more tissues and showed clearer signs of a "cytokine ...
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