Photographer: Andrey Rudakov / Bloomberg
Photographer: Andrey Rudakov / Bloomberg
Russia has said it has found the world’s first cases of the H5N8 strain of bird flu in humans, although the virus has not yet spread to humans.
Authorities sent information about the seven cases found to workers on a poultry farm in southern Russia to the World Health Organization, Anna Popova, the country’s head of public health, said in a television statement on Saturday.
‘It is not transmitted from person to person. But only time will tell how quickly future mutations will make it possible to overcome this barrier, ‘she said. The discovery of this strain “now gives us all, the whole world, time to prepare for possible mutations and the ability to respond in time and develop test systems and vaccines.”
The workers involved on the poultry farm, where an outbreak among birds was reported in December, had mild cases and recovered, Popova said.
The rapid identification of the strain means that the development of testing to detect new infections and potential vaccines can begin, Rinat Maksyutov, head of the Vector research center, which made the finding, told state television.
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In November, Vector reported that a new H5N8 flu strain was circulating in 15 Russian regions among poultry and wild birds, but was not considered dangerous to humans, the Interfax news service reported.
In 2012, health officials investigated a type of bird flu that killed hundreds of wild ducks in the Krasnodar region in southern Russia due to potential human risks.
More than 2 million ducks and other poultry were slaughtered in France in late January due to outbreaks of bird flu or as a preventative measure, the country’s Ministry of Agriculture reported.
There have been 862 laboratory-confirmed cases of human infection with the H5N1 strain of bird flu, including 455 deaths since 2003 in 17 countries, the WHO said in a December 9 report. Six of the 14 cases of H5N6 bird flu in people reported since 2014 were fatal, the WHO said in a November 2016 report.
“Although human infections with A (H5) viruses are rare and commonly occur in individuals exposed to sick or dead infected birds (or their environments), they can lead to serious illness or death in humans,” the WHO said in a statement. website said.
(Updates with Vector header in fifth paragraph, WHO data in ninth)