The H5N1 bird flu virus has been making headlines for a year and a half. The pathogen has been spotted almost everywhere in the world, not only in birds, but also in mammals such as mink, foxes or sea lions – and in humans. Just yesterday, the international news agency BNO News reported a case from the eastern Chinese province of Jiangsu. There, a 53-year-old woman was apparently ill after contact with poultry. In February, she tested positive for H5N1.
The special thing about this case is that the current virus strain called 2.3.4.4b was the cause of the infection. This highly contagious variant is now circulating around the world, even in countries where bird flu has never been seen before. The situation is worrying, WHO expert Sylvie Briand told BNO News. “WHO takes the threat posed by the virus seriously and calls for increased vigilance from all countries.”
Bird flu: More than 860 infections worldwide
Older strains of the H5N1 virus have been found in humans several times in recent months. An 11-year-old girl died from bird flu in Cambodia last week. The World Health Organization (WHO) reported that her father was also infected. In January, a nine-year-old girl in South America tested positive for the virus. And in September, the pathogen killed a 38-year-old woman in Guangxi, China. According to the WHO, more than 860 people worldwide have contracted the H5N1 virus since 2003, and the infection was fatal in around 450 cases.
Accumulated transmissions from person to person, which would be a prerequisite for a pandemic, are not yet known. However, the possibility of this happening cannot be ruled out and is currently the greatest concern of many experts. Concerns have grown since the H5N1 virus has been found more frequently in mammals, which increases the risk of adaptive mutations. The danger is particularly high in places where mammals live closely together, such as in factory farming. According to the World Organization for Animal Health WOAH, there is also an increasing risk that different influenza viruses will develop into dangerous new strains and subtypes.
Prepare for the pandemic with vaccine development
According to the virologist Christian Drosten from the Charité Berlin, there is currently no reason to panic. “Limited infections between humans have indeed been described in the past, but they are nowhere near as effective as would be at the beginning of a human pandemic,” he recently told the Ärzteblatt. “In the genome of the viruses analyzed to date, in some cases already seen the first adaptation mutations to mammals. But these alone are not an alarm signal.” Nevertheless, the scientist advocates preparing vaccine development for a possible pandemic.
For many animals, however, the situation is dramatic even without a pandemic. They are dying en masse, either directly from bird flu or from being killed to prevent it from spreading. Since early 2022, the H5N1 virus has become a death sentence for more than 100 million poultry in the US and Europe alone. That’s not even counting mink, sea lions and foxes.
(jl)