The virus has already killed her mother, and Kelly Gu’s father lies critically ill with H7N9 bird flu in a Shanghai hospital bed – the only couple both infected in China’s outbreak of the disease.
As her mother lay dying Gu was urgently summoned back to Shanghai from her doctoral studies in chemistry in France, but she was too late, missing the chance to say goodbye by a day.
In her first interview with Western media, she said she knew her mother was dead when her father, already showing symptoms of fatigue and fever, told her by phone: “It’s just like winning a lottery, it’s a lottery of very bad luck.”
The Gu family’s experience portrays a government-run health system battling a new disease, while sometimes showing a lack of empathy for victims and their kin.
The H7N9 strain of bird flu has sickened 130 people in mainland China and killed 35 of them, according to the latest available national figures.
The government and World Health Organisation (WHO) have repeatedly said there is no evidence of sustained human-to-human transmission, but Gu’s parents could be a rare “family cluster”.
