ISLAMABAD: According to the World Health Organization (WHO), a 56-year-old woman in southern China has died after flu testing positive for H3N8 avian influenza, marking the initial human death from that strain of bird flu.
While H3N8 is “one of the frequently found” subtypes of flu in birds, it hadn’t been detected in humans before two cases emerged in April and May of the previous year, both in China.
In a statement, the World Health Organization said the woman, who had pre-existing medical circumstances including cancer, had been admitted to the hospital with severe pneumonia after falling ill in February. She died the previous month.
WHO stance
WHO said, “A case was detected through the severe acute respiratory infection (SARI) surveillance system. No close contacts of the case developed the infection and symptoms of illness at the time of reporting.”
All three citizens who contracted H3N8 in China are thought to have been exposed to the virus at live chicken markets. The United Nations (UN) health agency said the government of China had stepped up monitoring for the strain and that the high risk of more infections was low.
It said that due to the constantly evolving nature of influenza viruses, World Health Organization continues to stress the significance of world surveillance to detect virologic, clinical and epidemiologic changes associated with circulating influenza viruses which affect human health.
The H3N8 infection is unrelated to the H5N1 bird flu pandemic, has devastated poultry and wild birds worldwide in the previous 18 months and has spread to mammals, including foxes, bears and domestic cats.
The medicine professor at Vanderbilt University’s Division of Infectious Diseases said that to infect humans, the H5N1 virus attaches itself to receptors in the lungs, which the virus cannot bond with readily, William Schaffner.
Schaffner added that forced adaptation to replicating in the lungs is why only poultry employees, who breathe in contaminated faecal dust, are infected.
The H3N8 virus is less dangerous for wild birds and domestic poultry than H5N1 and has been circulating since 2002 after first rising in North American waterfowl.
