United States: California Governor Gavin Newsom declared an emergency on Wednesday because bird flu is spreading among the state’s dairy cattle. He said this action will help government agencies have the resources they need to handle the situation quickly. While the risk to people is still low, Governor Newsom said they will keep working to stop the virus from spreading.
The announcement was made following hospitalization of a Louisiana resident with bird flu (H5N1), the first serious case establishment in the United States.
Ongoing avian flu outbreak in the United States started in Texas in the first quarter of this year spreads to 16 states with 865 affected herds reported as of Wednesday.
As reported by the HealthDay, those affected include California, 645 of its dairies, with half of those reported within the past 30 days.
And it is actually not clear like how the teenager picked up to the flu virus because the patient is not known to have many contacts with the infected animals noted by the officials, and they added that
However, professionals affirm that the virus cannot transmit efficiently from one person to another: every new infection in animals makes this virus gradually evolve and becomes potentially dangerous for humans.
So far, official statistics indicate 61 of alleged H5N1 human cases have occurred across the country; however, CDC has estimated that seven other cases rival this figure.
Thirty-two of the confirmed cases are located in California and are over half of all such cases. While 37 of these infections have been attributed to contact with infected cattle some are acquired from diseased birds or other animals and there are several which could not be explained.
“All these infections in so many species around us is paving a bigger and bigger runway for the virus to potentially evolve to infect humans better and transmit between humans,” Dr. Nahid Bhadelia, director of the Boston University Center on Emerging Infectious Diseases, said to New York Times.
The disease broke out in poultry since 2022 and lately cases in dairy cows began to manifest themselves last March. The virus is fairly newly known and was recently found in a pig.
This early this month, officials in the province of British Columbia, Canada revealed that a teenager had been admitted in hospital with a critical condition of what is suspected to be bird flu.
Authorities say it also remains elusive how the teenager contracted the H5N1 virus because the patient does not have any history of exposure to infected animals.