Cases of transmission to humans remain very rare for the moment. But it can happen like the person who tested positive for bird flu after being infected by a dairy cow in Texas or the nine-year-old carrying the H5N1 strain who died in Cambodia in February. The World Health Organization is in any case monitoring the situation closely, expressing its fears about the increasing spread of the H5N1 strain of avian flu to new species, including humans.
“It remains, I think, a huge concern,” Jeremy Farrar, chief scientist of the United Nations health agency, said at a press briefing on Thursday in Geneva. The authorities especially fear that the H5N1 virus, which is particularly deadly in people contaminated by their contact with infected animals, will adapt to become capable of being transmitted from human to human, but if there is currently no no evidence of this transmission.
A high fatality rate among infected people
Between the start of 2023 and April 1, 2024, the WHO recorded a total of 889 human cases of avian flu in 23 countries, including 463 deaths, bringing the case fatality rate to 52%. Beyond monitoring humans infected by animals, “it’s even more important to understand how many human infections occur without your knowledge, because that’s where the adaptation” of the virus will occur, he said. explained Jeremy Farrar.
“It’s tragic to say, but if I get infected with H5N1 and die, it’s over. If I go around the community and transmit it to someone else, then you start the cycle,” he explained, believing that infection surveillance and detection systems “are never enough “.