The World Health Organization (WHO) warned about the rising prevalence of H5N1 bird flu infection in other species, including humans. “This remains I think an enormous concern,” WHO’s chief scientist Jeremy Farrar told reporters in Geneva.
The UN health agency official described the current bird flu outbreak, which now includes infections in cows and goats, as a global zoonotic animal pandemic.
“The great concern of course is that in… infecting ducks and chickens and then increasingly mammals, that virus now evolves and develops the ability to infect humans and then critically the ability to go from human to human,” Farrar said.
Though there is no evidence of human-to-human transmission of the H5N1 virus, the “extraordinarily high” mortality rate in hundreds of cases where humans contracted the virus through contact with animals has raised significant concerns.
The UN agency informed about the worrying mortality rate of 52 percent as it has recorded 463 deaths from 889 humans in 23 states in the last 15 months.
When “you come into the mammalian population, then you’re getting closer to humans,” Farrar said, warning that “this virus is just looking for new, novel hosts”.
