The first United States’ government bird flu death casualty has been reported.
The development is as officials confirmed Monday a person in Louisiana who had been hospitalised with severe respiratory symptoms died.
Since March 2024, 66 confirmed bird flu infections have been reported in the US, but previous illnesses have been mild and most have been detected among farmworkers exposed to sick poultry or dairy cows.
Officials continue to urge people who have contact with sick or dead birds to take precautions, including wearing respiratory and eye protection and gloves when handling poultry.
In the first death incident recorded, the victim was said to have been older than 65.
Before his death, he had underlying medical problems and had been in contact with sick and dead birds in a backyard flock.
No other details were revealed.
According to a genetic analysis of the patient’s infection, it was suggested the bird flu virus had mutated while inside their body, which could have caused a more severe illness.
While the cause of the crisis has not been fully determined, experts put H5N1 at the top of their lists of pandemic threats.
This is even made stronger due to how widespread it is among animals and how rapidly it appears to be mutating.
It was also reported that the death in Louisiana marks the first human case in the US linked to exposure to backyard birds, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
As of the time of this report, Louisiana officials noted that they do not have evidence that the virus is spreading from person to person.
The H5N1 bird flu has been spreading widely among wild birds, poultry, cows and other animals, however.
And its growing presence in the environment increases the chances people will be exposed, and potentially catch it, officials have said
Infectious disease experts are also alarmed over the figures, warning the scale of cases and every infection outside of birds raises the risk of the virus gaining mutations, allowing it to spread between people.
Dr Marc Johnson, a virologist at the University of Missouri, recently said on X: ‘This virus might not go pandemic, but it is really trying hard, and it sure is getting a lot of opportunities.’
Overall, figures show since the virus was detected in the US in January 2022, more than 12,000 wild and domestic flocks have been infected.
After the virus spread to cows this year, it was diagnosed in 866 herds across 16 states – with the majority in California and Colorado.
And 66 cases have now been detected in humans across ten states this year, the most cases reported in the US in at least two decades. Before the current outbreak, the last human case of bird flu was in 1997.
