United States: As the country returns to normal stage of life after the long period of Covid pandemic, many people feel like it’s a actually distant memory. However, infectious disease experts are still carefully watching for any new changes or threats from the virus since it was first discovered in 2019.
But now they believe they’ve discovered one in influenza A subtype H5N1 — known as ‘bird flu’ — which has made at least 66 people sick in 10 states. People caught these cases from becoming infected with poultry and cattle or drinking unpasteurized milk.
No human-to-human transmission has taken place here.
But with every infectious cross species the risk increases that the virus will mutate so it can better infect humans.
As reported by the MailOnline, Nottingham Trent University professor of genetic makeup of microbial communities, Dr Conor Meehan studies how bacteria spread and evolve.
He said: ‘That’s quite a big increase compared to only two cases in the Americas in the previous two years.’ Bird flu is quickly jumping up the list of public health officials’ priorities,’ coupling this with a 30 percent mortality rate from human infections.
Just hours after the US declared a state of emergency over the virus and reported its first severe human case of H5N1 in Louisiana and California, where 36 of the country’s bid flu cases have been diagnosed, this week.
‘That’s because H5N1 bird flu does not easily transmit from human to human, Dr Meehan said, so ‘in its current form, it’s really hard to say that it has the potential to cause a pandemic in humans… in its current form the bird flu doesn’t seem to transmit from person to person.’
But he also noted that ‘a recently published study found that a single mutation of the flu genome could convert H5N1 into a strain that could spread from human to human, and kick off a pandemic.’
In humans, most cases of bird flu have been mild, usually resulting in the symptoms of conjunctivitis (pink eye), cough or trouble breathing, sore throat, muscle or body aches, diarrhea and vomiting.
A Louisiana patient, however, became the first to become hospitalized last week.