More good news on the H7N9 front. Shanghai, ground zero for H7N9 cases, has recently announced that emergency surveillance measures will be ended. Activities involving live poultry are still banned in the city, though (including raising or selling them).

New cases have crept up very slowly only to 131, which is good, but the location of new cases continues to spread from southeast China, which is worrisome since the route is transmission is still unknown.

The case fatality rate is now 38%, with 35 deaths. The Chinese released the results of tests on 20,000 people with possible flu-like symptoms, and they found only a handful of infected with H7N9 among them, indicating that mild cases of H7N9 seem to be rare. Basically, if you catch it, chances are, you get very, very sick.

The lone case outside China, a Taiwanese businessman, has been transferred out of the ICU. That's a good sign because he was previously on a ventilator and also undergoing ECMO--the desperate last-ditch measure that became widespread during the H1N1 "swine flu" pandemic. The healthcare workers who tended to him and became ill turned out not to have H7N9.