China’s Ministry of Health announced yesterday that it has registered the first human infection with the H3N8 strain of bird flu, but has determined the risk of its transmission among people to be minimal.
A four-year-old from the province of Henan was reported to be infected with the variant after presenting with a fever and other symptoms on 5 April. No close contacts were infected with the virus, according to the country’s National Health Commission.
However, Reuters reported that the boy had been in contact with the chickens and crows that are reared at his home.
An initial evaluation indicated that the H3N8 variant was not strong enough to infect humans successfully and the likelihood of a large-scale epidemic was quite low.
The H3N8 variation has previously been discovered in horses, dogs, birds, and seals across the world, but no human cases of H3N8 have ever been documented.
China has a large population of both farmed and wild birds of various kinds, which provides ideal habitats for avian viruses to combine and mutate. Many distinct strains of bird flu are present in the country, some of which infect people on a periodic basis — generally individuals who interact with poultry, and it had announced its first human case of H10N3 infection last year.
Other places with a soaring emergence of bird flu also include Alberta, Canada, where 16 cases of avian influenza (AI) were reported yesterday.
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