H5N1 and Dog bites?

There has been a confirmed case of H5N1 in Jiangsu Province in China. The weird thing is that he may have gotten it from a dogbite...?

Read Here:
The Jiangsu Provincial Health Bureau announced on the night of Sun 2
Dec 2007 that the Ministry of Health had confirmed a human case of
highly pathogenic avian influenza in Jiangsu, and that [the patient]
had died in hospital that day due to multiple organ failure.

In an exclusive interview with Health Times, Professor Yin Kaisheng,
attending physician for the fatal Nanjing avian influenza case,
Ministry of Health national public health emergency response
specialist, and official in charge of the Jiangsu Province Health
Bureau's Human Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza Prevention Medical
Treatment Team, stated that, for the moment, it is not possible for a
SARS-like super-spreader to emerge, transmitting avian influenza from
one person to the masses. Residents don't need to panic.

Yin Kaisheng revealed that during this patient's hospitalization
there was no way to confirm [he had] avian influenza. It was the
Jiangsu Center for Disease Control's laboratory that detected that
the infection was H5N1 type avian influenza virus. Moreover, the
patient always maintained that he had no way [to contract] this
infection, and had no history of contact with poultry. It is only
known that 20 days before becoming ill [he] had been bitten by a dog,
and 20 days later [he] developed fever after drinking a little alcohol.

...

However it is possible that dogs in their role as scavengers could
mechanically transmit bird flu virus by biting. The 20-day lapse
between bite and onset of illness in this case makes this route of
transmission of disease unlikely, and there would still have to
reservoir of infected wild birds or domestic poultry in the area.

Interesting! Those dogs in China ARE pretty nasty (you'll have to see them to believe them)

Steph