Risk of Bird Flu Spreading to Humans Is Great Concern: World Health Organization

There’s a risk avian influenza, after spreading to several new mammal species, will begin to infect more humans, the chief scientist of the World Health Organization (WHO) said on April 18.

Highly pathogenic avian influenza A, or H5N1, has recently infected cows and goats in the United States, after spreading among chickens for years.

H5N1 has kept circulating to new species and has “become a global zoonotic animal pandemic,” Jeremy Farrar, the WHO’s chief scientist, told reporters in Geneva.

“The great concern, of course, is that in doing so, and infecting ducks and chickens but now increasingly mammals, that that virus now evolves and develops the ability to infect humans, and then critically the ability to go from human to human,” he added.

The influenza, commonly known as bird flu, has infected cattle in eight states, most recently in South Dakota. One person in Texas has been confirmed to have contracted the illness. Sequencing of a sample collected from that patient showed the virus had one change from earlier animal sequencing, and the change has been linked with making the virus more likely to infect animals, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said this month.

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