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The World Health Organization has expressed concern about the spread of bird flu (H5N1), among humans after another outbreak of the disease among animals.
The current bird flu outbreak began in 2020, and led to the death of tens of millions of poultry, and infected wild birds as well as land and marine mammals.
The virus has made a worrying jump to new species, such as cows, cats and seals, over the past few months, a surprising development for experts because it was not expected that these animals would be susceptible to this type of flu. The virus is now being transmitted to humans, increasing the possibility that it will become more transmissible.
The World Health Organization has warned of the possibility of unusually high death rates if the disease gets out of control.
Jeremy Farrar, chief scientist at the World Health Organization, said: “The influenza A strain (H5N1“It has become a global zoonotic pandemic and the biggest concern, of course, is that as ducks and chickens and then increasingly mammals are infected, this virus is now evolving and developing the ability to infect humans and then the ability to transmit from one human to another.”
“In the hundreds of cases where humans have become infected through contact with animals, the mortality rate is extraordinarily high,” Farrar noted.
The World Health Organization said that from the beginning of 2023 until April 1 of this year, it recorded 463 deaths out of 889 human cases in 23 countries, raising the death rate to 52%.
In a worrying development, US authorities said earlier this month that a person in Texas was recovering from bird flu after being exposed to cattle milk.
This is only the second case of a human testing positive for bird flu in the country, and came after the virus infected flocks that were apparently exposed to wild birds in Texas, Kansas and other states.
The World Health Organization added that this also appears to be the first human infection with the influenza A virus strain (H5N1) through contact with an infected mammal.
Source: Russia Today
2024-04-19 18:18:41