A senior WHO official on Friday said the global spread of avian flu and human infections are “worrying,” after an 11-year-old girl in Cambodia died after being infected with the virus.
WHO Global Infectious Hazard Preparedness Director Sylvie Briand said the UN agency is “in close communication with the Cambodian authorities to understand more about the outbreak.”
Speaking ahead of a meeting in Geneva, Switzerland, on influenza vaccines, Briand called the global avian flu situation “worrying given the wide spread of the virus in birds around the world, and the increasing reports of cases in mammals, including humans.”
Photo: AFP / Cambodia`s Communicable Disease Control Department
“WHO takes the risk from this virus seriously and urges heightened vigilance from all countries,” she said.
Independent experts also have expressed concern over a wave of avian flu that has spread through much of the world since late 2021, posing a potential public health risk.
The Cambodian girl, from a village in the southeastern province of Prey Veng, died on Wednesday at a hospital in the capital, Phnom Penh, shortly after tests confirmed she had Type A H5N1 avian influenza, the Cambodian Ministry of Health said.
She had fallen ill on Thursday last week, and when her condition declined she was sent to the hospital with a fever as high as 39°C with coughing and throat pain.
The girl’s father tested positive for the virus, but has not displayed any major symptoms, health authorities said on Friday.
Avian flu normally spreads among poultry, but can sometimes spread from poultry to humans. The recent detection of infections in a variety of mammals, including at a large mink farm in Spain, has raised concern among experts that the virus could evolve to spread more easily between people, and potentially trigger a pandemic.
Health ministry spokesperson Ly Sovann said the father’s case is under investigation, and it was not yet known how he became infected.
He has been put in isolation at a local district hospital for monitoring and treatment, Ly said.
A ministry team collected samples from 12 people from the girl’s village known to have had direct contact with her, and laboratory tests on Friday confirmed that only her father was infected.
Health professionals have expressed concern about a wave of bird flu that has spread worldwide in the past year and a half, but consider the current risk to humans to be low.
“There has been a massive global challenge of wild and domestic birds with the current H5N1 avian influenza virus over the last few months and years, which will have exposed many humans; despite this, what is remarkable is how few people have been infected,” University of Cambridge Department of Veterinary Medicine professor James Wood said in an e-mailed statement.
“Tragic though this case in Cambodia is, we expect there to be some cases of clinical disease with such a widespread infection. Clearly the virus needs careful monitoring and surveillance to check that it has not mutated or recombined, but the limited numbers of cases of human disease have not increased markedly and this one case in itself does not signal the global situation has suddenly changed,” Wood added.
WHO data show that there were 56 avian flu cases in humans in Cambodia from 2003 to 2014, and 37 of them were fatal.
Globally, about 870 human infections and 457 deaths have been reported to the WHO in 21 countries, for an overall case fatality rate of 53 percent.
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