A woman in China was recently hospitalised with the strain of bird flu that’s increasingly infecting mammals across the world, it has emerged.
The H5N1 case – in a 53-year-old in Jiangsu province, just north of Shanghai – comes after a young girl died last week and her father was quarantined in Cambodia, causing global alarm amid initial fears human-to-human transmission was involved.
That turned out not to be the case, but experts have warned that all three infections are a striking reminder of the threat of avian influenza at a time when H5N1 is causing an unprecedented outbreak in birds and, increasingly, mammals.
“The risk [for humans] is increasing in the sense that there is a lot of virus in poultry and wild birds,” Prof Munir Iqbal, head of the Avian Influenza Group at The Pirbright Institute and a member of the government’s new modelling group for bird flu, told the Telegraph. “The virus can change at any time, and therefore the risk is higher when there’s more in the environment. That doesn’t mean [a human epidemic] is imminent… but no one has control of the virus… so you can say there is a serious risk,” he said.
According to the World Health Organization, China informed the agency about the latest case on February 24, but it was only reported this week. The 53-year-old woman – who has a history of contact with poultry – fell ill on January 31, and was hospitalised on February 4.
Unlike the cases in Cambodia, which were linked to a strain of H5N1 that has been endemic in the region for a decade, the Chinese woman contracted the variant currently behind an unprecedented global outbreak in birds. “Genomic sequencing showed that she was infected with H5N1 clade 2.3.4.4b, which is widely circulating in birds at the moment,” said Dr Sylvie Briand, director of epidemic and pandemic preparedness and prevention at the WHO. “Since 2020, an increased number of avian influenza outbreaks have been reported in wild birds and poultry globally, and we can expect additional sporadic human cases,” she added.
At a press conference last week, Dr Briand also said that the UN agency is “really concerned” about the potential for human-to-human transmission to emerge. Part of the current unease stems from mounting cases in mammals, including signs in mink and sea lions that the 2.3.4.4b clade is becoming better at spreading between them. This week, Peru announced that the death toll from H5N1 had jumped to 3,500 in sea lions – five times as many as previously reported. Their symptoms were mainly neurological, such as tremors, convulsions and paralysis. While it is unclear how they were infected, researchers said the size of the outbreak means they cannot rule out mammal-to-mammal spread.
“If transmission between mammals have started, the virus has changed and this could increase the risk for human health,” Dr Pablo Plaza, an expert in veterinary public health and epidemiology at the National University of Comahue in Argentina, and co-author of the first pre-print describing the sea lion outbreak, told the Telegraph last week. “Until now, this risk seems to be low – however, we must be alert since [the] virus is changing all the time. Several changes in the virus are needed to adapt to human-human transmission, so hopefully they will not occur,” he added. The latest H5N1 case in China comes after a woman died from the virus in November in the southern province of Guangxi. This week, the country has also reported cases of two other types of avian influenza – H5N6 and H9N2
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