Human h5 Bird Flu - Today International News.com

human h5 bird flu

There are several strains of influenza; this one in particular will infect birds, but it can also infect other animals. Many different wild birds can have this. Of course, the wild birds are everywhere. They fly all over the world and so then because the virus is in their secretions and their feces, then it can contaminate domestic bird flocks, and commercial bird flocks. Still, it can also contaminate areas that other animals are in, such as cattle.

So people can get it if they have close contact with infected animals and most of the infected animals are sick or dying. So it's not common, but it rarely does occur and there's been reported transmission from other animals too. When people get it, there's a whole variety of manifestations that they can have.

It can be very severe, resulting in death, but it can also be very mild, resulting in only some eye irritation, conjunctivitis, or mild influenza-like symptoms. The usual ones that we're familiar with are fever, cough, runny nose, and sneezing. There's been very rare cases of person-to-person transmission and so the vast majority of cases are acquired from animals, from sick or dying animals.

So people who have this can still get antiviral medication like we give for regular influenza.   Oseltamivir or Tamiflu is effective against this strain and the CDC continues to do surveillance to make sure that resistance isn't developing. The traditional influenza vaccines, don't protect against this strain because they are strain-specific.

Well, certainly anybody who's around sick or dying animals should be wearing full PPE, so that would be goggles, masks -- an N95 mask --  hair/head covering, gown, and booties or boot covers for your shoes. So that's recommended for people who are in contact with dead or dying animals.

People who are around other animals, you'd want to avoid contact with their feces or their secretions because those are infectious fluids. We would hope that dead or dying animals, should be culled from the herd so that wouldn't enter the food chain, and then milk for example, if it's pasteurized, which the vast majority is pasteurized, would kill any infectious virus.

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So really the only danger would be from perhaps raw milk or unpasteurized milk and we don't recommend that anyway because that carries other risks. We don't know if the virus can mutate more to be even more infectious, so instead of having these rare transmission events, if it does mutate enough, perhaps it'll be easier to transmit to humans and then it may even develop mechanisms to transmit from human-to-human easier,  whereas now, all the past evidence shows that that's extraordinarily rare. So that's something to keep an eye on.