WPBN: The first H5N1 virus-related mortality in the United States occurred in Louisiana, where a person passed away following hospitalization due to bird flu, the state’s health authority reported Monday.
Louisiana’s health agency said in a statement that “the patient was over the age of 65 and was reported to have underlying medical conditions,” adding that health experts continue to consider the virus’s danger to the public’s health to be minimal.
After being exposed to wild birds and a personal backyard poultry flock infected with the virus, the patient tested positive and became seriously ill, the health authorities said. There were no other cases of the virus causing illness in Louisiana.
“CDC has thoroughly examined the material that is currently available regarding the Louisiana death and maintains the low level of risk to the public. Most significantly, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in a statement on Monday that no person-to-person transmission spread had been found.
At least seven additional deaths from other nations have been connected to H5N1 in recent years. The World Health Organization has reported that the virus has killed over 400 people since 2003.
Although officials stated that the patient had not been admitted due to the illness, another U.S. hospital patient in Missouri tested positive for the infection last year. Rather, the patient was receiving treatment for additional previous medical issues while in the hospital.
The CDC’s genetic sequencing last month revealed that the D1.1 strain of the bird flu virus was the cause of the Louisiana patient’s illness.
The sequencing showed that the patient’s virus did include a few uncommon and perhaps concerning mutations. According to the CDC’s analysis, those genetic modifications to the virus were not present in the animals that most likely infected the humans and most likely developed later in the illness.
“Although concerning, and a reminder that A(H5N1) viruses can develop changes during the clinical course of a human infection, these changes would be more concerning if found in animal hosts or in early stages of infection,” according to the CDC.
The virus that caused a 13-year-old girl in Canada to become seriously unwell late last year was the same strain, D1.1.
Although they were unable to pinpoint the infection’s origin, health officials in British Columbia, Canada, reported last year that they had discovered that the virus sequence closely matched wild birds that were passing through the province in October.
The B3.13 genotype of H5N1 bird flu, which has been causing the historic outbreak on dairy farms across the United States for the past year, is distinct from this D1.1 strain.
According to the CDC, there have been 66 documented human cases of any of the H5 subtypes of bird flu in the United States since last year, including the Louisiana case.
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Workers who contracted the B3.13 strain after handling infected livestock have accounted for the majority of human cases. The virus has not caused any hospitalization or fatalities in any of those human cases.
There is still “no evidence of sustained human-to-human” spread of H5N1, according to the CDC. According to the FDA, “limited” H5N1 transmission is thought to have happened inside small groups of people in certain previous epidemics abroad.
In every state, at least one H5N1 strain has now been detected in wild birds or poultry. Hawaii was the 50th state to report finding an infected bird in November. At least 16 states have seen hundreds of cow herds test positive for H5N1.
