The H5N2 strain has never been found in a human, the health agency says, but emphasizes that the risk remains low.
A man in Mexico with previous health complications has died after contracting the A (H5N2) strain of bird flu, the World Health Organization (WHO) announced, warning that the risk of the virus to the general public remains low.
The global health agency, in a statement on Wednesday, said the 59-year-old died in Mexico City in April after developing symptoms including fever, shortness of breath, diarrhea and nausea.
The man’s relatives said he had already been bedridden for three weeks for other reasons before the acute symptoms began.
Mexico’s public health department said in a statement that the man’s underlying illnesses included chronic kidney failure, diabetes and hypertension.
He sought hospital care on April 24 and died the same day.
Initial tests showed an unidentified flu strain that subsequent weeks of laboratory testing confirmed to be A(H5N2), the WHO said.
It was the “first laboratory-confirmed human case of influenza A (H5N2) virus infection reported globally,” the agency added.
Andrew Pekosz, a flu expert at Johns Hopkins University in the United States, told the Reuters news agency that the man’s previous health conditions put him at “risk of more severe flu.”
But how this individual became infected “is a big question mark.”
The WHO said the source of exposure to the virus was unknown, although cases of A(H5N2) have been reported in poultry in Mexico. These include a chicken farm in the state of Michoacán, which borders the state of Mexico, where the man lived, but authorities have so far been unable to establish a link.
The WHO said no other human cases were discovered despite testing people who came into contact with the deceased at home and in hospital.
“Based on available information, WHO assesses the current risk to the general population posed by this virus as low,” he said.
The Mexican Ministry of Health also stated that “there is no risk of contagion for the population”, noting that “all samples from identified contacts [of the patient] were negative.”
Authorities are monitoring farms near the victim’s home and have established a permanent monitoring system to detect other wildlife cases in the area, the ministry added.
A different variant of bird flu, A(H5N1), has been spreading among dairy cow herds in the U.S. for weeks, with a small number of cases reported among humans.
Other strains of bird flu have killed people around the world in previous years, including 18 people in China during a 2021 A(H5N6) outbreak, according to a chronology of bird flu outbreaks from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. USA.
Pekosz said that since 1997, H5 viruses have continually shown a propensity to infect mammals, more so than any other bird flu virus.
“So the warning bells continue to ring that we must be very vigilant in monitoring these infections, because each spread is an opportunity for the virus to try to accumulate the mutations that make it better at infecting humans,” Pekosz said.
This story originally appeared on Aljazeera.com read the full story
