WHO raises alarm over human cases of bird flu, calls it 'enormous concern'

The World Health Organization (WHO) has raised alarm bells for new species, including humans, who are prone to extraordinarily high mortality rates, over the rapid rise of H5N1 bird flu.

"This remains I think an enormous concern," the UN health agency's chief scientist Jeremy Farrar told reporters in Geneva.

The bird flu outbreak, that started in the year 2020, has so far claimed the lives of tens of millions of poultry, along with infecting wild birds as well as land and marine mammals.

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Surprisingly, other species that were affected by the contagion were cows and goats, which as per the experts were not even considered vulnerable to this type of influenza.

The A (H5N1) strain has become "a global zoonotic animal pandemic", Farrar said.

"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."

For now, experts say that there were no reports of the spread of the virus amongst humans, however, in cases where humans were infected through contact with animals, "the mortality rate is extraordinarily high", Farrar said.

The WHO said that from the year 2003 to 1 April 2024, it recorded around 463 deaths from over 889 human cases across 23 countries, which it said put the case mortality rate at 52 per cent.

Bird flu case in US

The United States had earlier this month raised concern after a person in Texas was recovering from influenza after being exposed to dairy cattle.

This was the second case of a human testing positive for the contagion after being exposed to the herd that caught the infection from wild birds in Texas, Kansas and other states.

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".

"It's a real concern."

Farrar further urged for ramping up the monitoring efforts stating that it was "very important understanding how many human infections are happening... because that's where adaptation (of the virus) will happen".

"It's a tragic thing to say, but if I get infected with H5N1 and I die, that's the end of it. If I go around the community and I spread it to somebody else then you start the cycle."

(With inputs from agencies)