Health
Does bird flu spread through human contact?
Samuel Scarpino said now is the time to step up response to avian flu, as Missouri has its first possible case of human-to-human transmission.
Until recently, all human cases of bird flu this year have been in people who had contact with infected poultry or cattle.
but, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention This month, it was announced that a person in Missouri had bird flu and had no history of contact with infected animals, but health researchers are concerned about the possibility of person-to-person spread.
“If H5N1 is transmitted from human to human, it automatically raises the threat level,” he said. Samuel ScarpinoDirector of AI + Life Sciences at the Experience AI Institute at Northeastern University.
“As you start to see sustained human-to-human transmission, mutations that increase the chance of infecting more people become more likely, giving you a selective advantage,” Scarpino said.
“So the concern is that we start to create an evolutionary environment for epidemics,” he says.
Potential for higher mortality
The human outbreak of bird flu has sparked fears of a high mortality rate, with 55% of 258 people infected in the Western Pacific region over an 11-year period ending in July dying from the disease, the ministry said. World Health Organization.
So far, all 14 people confirmed to have been infected with the H5N1 virus in the United States this year have made full recoveries.
“There's something different genetically about this particular strain that may make it less of a problem,” Scarpino said.
Other preventative factors include the fact that the infection is being detected early and is occurring among agricultural workers, who tend to be younger, he said.
But Scarpino said the number of cases in the U.S. this year — four from contact with dairy cows, nine from contact with chickens and one case with possible human infection — is still too low to establish a fatality rate.
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“The fatality rate is still within the margin of error, so we're not out of the woods yet,” he said.
“The case fatality rate could be 10%, which is 100 times higher than COVID,” Scarpino said. “That's bad. The case fatality rate could still be very high.”
“If the fatality rate is similar to what we've seen in past H5N1 outbreaks, we would expect it to be about 500 times worse than COVID.”
What do we know about the Missouri incident?
Scarpino said many questions remain about the Missouri case, because the hospitalized patient was identified by the CDC through the state's seasonal influenza surveillance system, the first time the system has identified an H5 case in the United States.
Scarpino said genome sequencing and polymerase chain reaction tests would confirm scientists' suspicions that the virus is H5N1 and not H5N2, a less pathogenic avian flu subtype.
Sequencing the genome will allow medical researchers to identify the source of the infection and see whether mutations have arisen that make it more transmissible from person to person, he says.
It's surprising that the CDC hasn't released genome sequencing results since announcing the human cases on September 6, but Scarpino said it's possible that federal health agencies weren't able to isolate enough virus from the samples to test them.
If person-to-person transmission is confirmed, he said, it will be important to find out who infected patients at Missouri hospitals and “follow that perimeter to find other cases.”
“We want to find this person and determine if they have infected others that haven't been found yet.”
“We really need to sequence this genome,” Scarpino said, adding that the genome and source of infection “will tell us everything we need to know about the threat profile.”
“If H5N1 is capable of human-to-human transmission, it means that at least one case of animal-to-human transmission was missed that led to infection and hospitalization in another person,” Scarpino said.
Eliminate the virus from cattle
Millions of chickens and ducks have been culled after being infected with the H5N1 virus, which can also make wild birds sick and dead.
Although dairy cows can show symptoms, most cattle restrictions for the H5N1 virus involve banning the movement of cattle from state to state to prevent the virus from spreading. The virus has not yet been found in dairy cows in Missouri.
The fact that cows are also mammals increases the possibility of infection in cows leading to person-to-person transmission.
“If we were to live in a world where H5N1 continues to circulate in dairy cows forever, it would only be a matter of time before we saw a major epidemic,” Scarpino said.
“Eventually, a series of things will go wrong and it will become an epidemic.”
“The virus needs to be eliminated from dairy herds through continued movement restrictions, increased surveillance and vaccination of cattle,” Scarpino said.
“While we agree with the CDC that the threat level to the public remains low, confirmation of human-to-human transmission of this H5N1 virus would increase the overall threat profile of this outbreak.”
Even if there is no ongoing transmission from the recently discovered human cases, “we may not be so lucky next time.”
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Sources 2/ https://news.northeastern.edu/2024/09/11/bird-flu-human-transmission/ The mention sources can contact us to remove/changing this article |
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