Press "Enter" to skip to content

Tag: avian influenza

In severe bird flu cases, the virus can mutate as it lingers in the body

A 13-year-old girl in British Columbia who was hospitalized with bird flu for several weeks late last year harbored a mutated version of the virus, according to a report published this week in the New England Journal of Medicine.

The case was Canada’s first recorded human infection of avian influenza, which has infected at least 66 people in the United States since last March, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. This includes the nation’s first severe case, in Louisiana in December.

Comments closed

B.C. teen no longer critical with avian flu, has been taken off oxygen

We’re learning more about the B.C. teenager who became the first critically ill pediatric patient with avian influenza in North America earlier this fall, including some details about her recovery.

The new information was published in a case summary as a letter to the editor of the New England Journal of Medicine on Tuesday, signed by multiple doctors from the B.C. Centre for Disease Control, BC Children’s Hospital and Public Health Agency of Canada.

Prior to the publication of the letter, B.C.’s Ministry of Health had refused to provide updates on the teen’s status or their case “unless there is a need from a public health perspective to do so.”

Comments closed

COVID-19 Turns Five Today. The Next Pandemic Is Lurking

Five years ago this morning on Dec. 31, 2019, I was sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee and my laptop. I was a member of “Flublogia,” a group of journalists, health scientists and kibitzers like me who had been tracking reports of disease outbreaks for years. I started every morning by checking my friends’ sites and Twitter feeds.

News had been slow lately; an Ebola outbreak in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo was fading out. But this morning, several of my friends had picked up a report from Hong Kong’s Centre for Health Protection about a “cluster of pneumonia cases in Wuhan, Hubei province.”

Comments closed

CDC says H5N1 bird flu sample shows mutations that may help the virus bind to cells in the upper airways of people

Genetic sequences of H5N1 bird flu viruses collected from a person in Louisiana who became severely ill show signs of development of several mutations thought to affect the virus’ ability to attach to cells in the upper airways of humans, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported on Thursday.

One of the mutations was also seen in a virus sample taken from a teenager in British Columbia who was in critical condition in a Vancouver hospital for weeks after contracting H5N1.

The mutation seen in both viruses is believed to help H5N1 adapt to be able to bind to cell receptors found in the upper respiratory tracts of people. Bird flu viruses normally attach to a type of cell receptor that is rare in human upper airways, which is believed to be one of the reasons why H5N1 doesn’t easily infect people and does not spread from person-to-person when it does.

Comments closed

American pet food sold in B.C. recalled after a cat died of bird flu

Northwest Naturals, an Oregon-based pet food company, is recalling a batch of its two pound (one kilogram) Feline Turkey Recipe raw frozen pet food after a cat that died of H5N1 avian influenza was linked to the product.

The recalled pet food was sold in British Columbia and several American states — including Oregon, Washington and California — and lists the best before dates as between May 21, 2026, and June 23, 2026, the Portland company said in a press release on Tuesday.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture confirmed one house cat in Washington County, Ore., became infected with H5N1 and died after eating the pet food, the Oregon Department of Agriculture (ODA) said in a press release on Thursday.

Comments closed

How America Lost Control of the Bird Flu, Setting the Stage for Another Pandemic

Keith Poulsen’s jaw dropped when farmers showed him images on their cellphones at the World Dairy Expo in Wisconsin in October. A livestock veterinarian at the University of Wisconsin, Poulsen had seen sick cows before, with their noses dripping and udders slack.

But the scale of the farmers’ efforts to treat the sick cows stunned him. They showed videos of systems they built to hydrate hundreds of cattle at once. In 14-hour shifts, dairy workers pumped gallons of electrolyte-rich fluids into ailing cows through metal tubes inserted into the esophagus.

“It was like watching a field hospital on an active battlefront treating hundreds of wounded soldiers,” he said.

Nearly a year into the first outbreak of the bird flu among cattle, the virus shows no sign of slowing. The U.S. government failed to eliminate the virus on dairy farms when it was confined to a handful of states, by quickly identifying infected cows and taking measures to keep their infections from spreading. Now at least 875 herds across 16 states have tested positive.

Comments closed

Avian flu detected in Manitoba for the 1st time this year

Manitoba has confirmed its first case of avian influenza in domestic birds for 2024 at a commercial poultry operation in Portage la Prairie.

The Canadian Food Inspection Agency said the viral infection was detected on Nov. 26. Similar cases have previously been detected in the province in 2022 and 2023.

CFIA has set a primary control zone in the area where the disease was detected.

Comments closed

Gov. Newsom declares state of emergency over bird flu to boost California’s response

California Gov. Gavin Newsom on Wednesday declared a state of emergency to boost the state’s response to the avian flu, which has infected more than 600 dairy herds and 34 people in the state amid a national outbreak that began in the spring.

The proclamation gives state and local agencies additional flexibility on staffing, contracting and other rules to support the H5N1 response, according to a statement from the governor’s office.

Comments closed

CDC confirms first severe case of H5N1 bird flu in U.S.

A person in Louisiana has the first severe illness caused by bird flu in the U.S., health officials said Wednesday.

The patient had been in contact with sick and dead birds in backyard flocks, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said. Agency officials didn’t immediately detail the person’s symptoms.

Previous illnesses in the U.S. had been mild and the vast majority had been among farm workers exposed to sick poultry or dairy cows.

Comments closed

Why hasn’t the bird flu pandemic started?

If the world finds itself amid a flu pandemic in a few months, it won’t be a big surprise. Birds have been spreading a new clade of the H5N1 avian influenza virus, 2.3.4.4b, around the world since 2021. That virus spilled over to cattle in Texas about a year ago and spread to hundreds of farms across the United States since. There have been dozens of human infections in North America. And in some of those cases the virus has shown exactly the kinds of mutations known to make it better suited to infect human cells and replicate in them.

No clear human-to-human transmission of H5N1 has been documented yet, but “this feels the closest to an H5 pandemic that I’ve seen,” says Louise Moncla, a virologist at the University of Pennsylvania. “If H5 is ever going to be a pandemic, it’s going to be now,” adds Seema Lakdawala, a flu researcher at Emory University.

Comments closed

Single bird flu mutation could let it latch easily to human cells, study finds

Scientists from the Scripps Research Institute are reporting that it would take just a single mutation in the version of bird flu that has swept through U.S. dairy herds to produce a virus adept at latching on to human cells, a much simpler step than previously imagined.

To date, there have been no documented cases of one human passing avian influenza to another, the Scripps scientists wrote in their paper, which was published Thursday in the journal Science. The mutation they identified would allow the virus to attach to our cells by hitching itself to a protein on their surface, known as the receptor.

Comments closed

How Ag-Gag Laws Hurt Animals and Increase Pandemic Risks

 Content warning: This article contains depictions of animal suffering and inhumane treatment of animals.

A teen in British Columbia recently became critically ill after becoming infected with H5N1. H5N1 is a highly pathogenic strain of bird flu.

Outbreaks of avian influenza, or bird flu, in livestock and flocks on industrial-scale chicken and dairy farms — so-called factory farms — in the United States are raising alarm bells for public health across the world.

Mainstream commercial animal agriculture is conducted in an intensive way in often cramped and unhygienic environments. These conditions are ideal for new viruses to jump from animals to humans.

Comments closed

UK orders H5 avian flu vaccine for pandemic preparedness

The UK Health Security Agency (HSA) today announced a contract with CSL Seqirus to buy more than 5 million doses of human H5 avian flu vaccine to prepare for a potential influenza pandemic.

In a statement, the HSA said the vaccine will be based on a current H5 strain and is part of a longer-term plans to ensure access to vaccines for a wider range of pathogens that have pandemic potential.

Comments closed

BC Closes Bird Flu Investigation After No Further Cases Found

A British Columbia teenager who got sick with bird flu two weeks ago did not infect any people or animals they were in contact with while infectious, according to provincial health officer Dr. Bonnie Henry.

The B.C. teenager was admitted to BC Children’s Hospital on Nov. 8 and remains in critical condition, although they have made some progress over the last few days and their care team is “hopeful that they will recover,” Henry said at a press conference Tuesday.

Because there have been no new cases and there are no new leads, the public health investigation will be closed for now, Henry said.

Comments closed

B.C. teen with avian flu remains in critical care, no other cases identified

The teenager who is infected with the first human case of H5N1 avian influenza acquired in Canada remains in critical care at BC Children’s Hospital, officials said Tuesday.

Speaking at a news conference in Victoria, provincial health officer Dr. Bonnie Henry said the young person is stable, but still very sick and on a respirator.

Comments closed

California reveals suspected avian flu case in child with mild symptoms

The California Department of Public Health (CDPH) today said tests have identified a suspected avian flu infection in a child from Alameda County who had mild upper respiratory symptoms and no known contact with infected animals.

If confirmed, the case would mark the second avian flu infection in a child in North America from a yet undetermined source. Last week, health officials in Canada reported an H5N1 infection in a previously healthy British Columbia teen who is hospitalized in critical condition.

Comments closed

Bird flu in Canada may have mutated to become more transmissible to humans

The teenager hospitalized with bird flu in British Columbia, Canada, may have a variation of the virus that has a mutation making it more transmissible among people, early data shows – a warning of what the virus can do that is especially worrisome in countries such as the US where some H5N1 cases are not being detected.

The US “absolutely” is not testing and monitoring bird flu cases enough, which means scientists could miss mutated cases like these, said Richard Webby, a virologist at St Jude children’s research hospital’s department of infectious diseases.

Comments closed

H5N1 bird flu virus in Canadian teenager displays mutations demonstrating virus’ risk

The genetic sequence of the H5N1 bird flu virus that infected a teenager in British Columbia shows that the virus had undergone mutational changes that would make it easier for that version of H5N1 to infect people, scientists who have studied the data say.

There’s currently no evidence the teenager, who remains in critical condition in hospital, infected anyone else. If that’s the case, it is likely this mutated version of the virus would die out when the teen’s illness resolves. The source of the teen’s infection has not been determined, so it’s impossible to know for sure if the mutations were in the virus that infected him or her. But scientists think it is more likely that the mutations developed during the course of his or her infection.

Comments closed