As avian flu spreads through bird populations around the world, the H5N1 virus increases its risk of transmission to mammals, including humans. In Cambodia, an 11-year-old girl died after catching bird flu, the government health monitoring agency said on Wednesday (February 22nd), before announcing that her father had also been diagnosed positive until then. without symptoms. Eleven other people who have been in contact with the girl are under surveillance.
If the World Health Organization (WHO) still considered the risk represented by the avian flu epidemic for humans to be low, it mentioned on Friday a “worrying situation”. “WHO takes the risk of this virus seriously and calls on all countries to be more vigilant”, underlined Sylvie Briand, in charge of the prevention of pandemics at the international organization. The family link between the two cases indeed accentuates the concerns: is it a transmission between humans or two cases of direct contamination after contact with birds? “We inevitably wonder what happened: could the first case have transmitted the disease to other humans? »insisted the epidemiologist, refusing to speculate before having received the results of the epidemiological investigation carried out in the field.
This is not the first time that cases of human contamination by avian influenza have been reported. Since its emergence in 1996, the H5N1 strain, which currently circulates very actively throughout the world, has been the cause of several human cases, but sporadically and without proven transmission between humans. This zoonotic risk appeared very early: in 1997, in Hong Kong, six people died of the disease. The slaughter of 3 million chickens made it possible to limit the epidemic. Since 2003, when the virus reappeared, the WHO has recorded 868 cases, including 457 deaths, representing a case fatality rate of 53%. Several episodes marked different regions of the world, in particular China, Indonesia and Vietnam between 2003 and 2009, Cambodia and Indonesia between 2010 and 2014, and Egypt over the entire period from 2003 to 2019. Earlier this year, a girl was also infected in Ecuador but recovered, according to the WHO.
Genetic expansion
“The risk has been taken seriously for years”explains Jean-Luc Guérin, professor at the National Veterinary School of Toulouse and laboratory director of the National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and the Environment (Inrae).
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