The current bird flu outbreak began in 2020. (Representational)
Geneva:
The World Health Organization expressed alarm Thursday at the increasing spread of H5N1 bird flu to new species, including humans, who face an “extraordinarily high” mortality rate.
“I think this continues to be a huge concern,” the UN health agency’s chief scientist, Jeremy Farrar, told reporters in Geneva.
The current outbreak of bird flu began in 2020 and has led to the deaths of tens of millions of poultry, with wild birds also infected, as well as land and marine mammals.
Cows and goats joined the list last month – a surprising development for experts because they were not considered susceptible to this type of flu.
The A (H5N1) strain has become “a global zoonotic animal pandemic,” Farrar said.
“The big concern, of course, is that by infecting ducks and chickens and then, increasingly, mammals, this virus now evolves and develops the ability to infect humans and then, critically, the ability to jump from human to human. ”.
So far, there is no evidence that the influenza A(H5N1) virus is spreading between humans.
But in the hundreds of cases in which humans have been infected through contact with animals, “the mortality rate is extraordinarily high,” Farrar said.
From the start of 2023 until April 1 this year, the WHO said it had recorded 463 deaths from 889 human cases in 23 countries, putting the case fatality rate at 52 percent.
In a worrying development, US authorities said earlier this month that a person in Texas was recovering from bird flu after being exposed to dairy cattle.
It was only the second case of a human testing positive for bird flu in the country, and it came after the virus sickened livestock that had apparently been exposed to wild birds in Texas, Kansas and other states.
It also appears to be the first human infection with the influenza A (H5N1) virus strain through contact with an infected mammal, the WHO said.
When “you get into the mammal population, then you’re getting closer to humans,” Farrar said, warning that “this virus is just looking for new hosts.”
“It’s a real concern.”
Farrar called for increased monitoring, insisting it was “very important to understand how many human infections are happening… because that’s where (the virus’s) adaptation will happen.”
“It’s a tragic thing to say, but if I become infected with H5N1 and die, that will be the end of everything. If I go through the community and spread the virus to someone else, then you start the cycle.”
He said efforts are underway to develop vaccines and therapeutics for H5N1 and stressed the need to ensure that regional and national health authorities around the world have the capacity to diagnose the virus.
This was being done so that “if H5N1 reached humans, with human-to-human transmission,” the world would be “in a position to respond immediately,” Farrar said, calling for equitable access to vaccines, therapeutics and diagnostics.
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