Last Updated on: 2nd June 2021, 12:02 pm
China sees the world’s first human infection with avian bird flu strain H10N3 on Tuesday (June 1), but said the risk of it spreading widely among people was small.
The man, a resident of Zhenjiang City, was hospitalized on April 28 after developing a fever and other symptoms, the NHC said in a statement. He was diagnosed with the H10N3 avian flu virus on May 28, he said, but did not provide any information on how the man contracted the virus.
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“The risk of widespread is extremely low,” said the NHC, adding that the man was in a stable condition and that his close contacts had not reported any “abnormalities”.
He described H10N3 as not very pathogenic and less likely to cause death or serious illness in birds. The man was stable and ready to be released from the hospital. Medical observation of his close contacts revealed no further cases.
The NHC said no cases of H10N3 have been reported in humans worldwide.
H10N3 is a mildly pathogenic or relatively less serious strain of the virus in poultry and the risk of widespread is very small, the NHC added.
The strain “is not a very common virus,” said Filip Claes, regional laboratory coordinator for the Food and Agriculture Organization’s Emergency Center for Cross-Border Animal Diseases at the Regional Office for Asia and the Pacific.
In the 40 years leading up to 2018, only about 160 isolates of the virus had been reported, mostly from wild or waterfowl in Asia and some limited parts of North America, and none had been detected in chickens, he added. The genetic data of the virus will need to be analyzed to determine whether it resembles older viruses or is a novel mix of different viruses, Claes said.
Various strains of bird flu have been found in animals in China, but massive outbreaks in humans are rare. The last human bird flu epidemic in China occurred between late 2016 and 2017 with the H7N9 virus.
According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, H7N9 has infected 1,668 people and claimed 616 lives since 2013.
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Following the recent avian flu outbreaks in Africa and Eurasia, the director of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention last week called for stricter surveillance of poultry farms, markets, and wild birds. Covid-19 was first discovered in late 2019 at a food and animal market in the central Chinese city of Wuhan.
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