Health officials have confirmed that the strain of bird flu that hospitalized a B.C. teenager in critical condition is related to the same virus causing outbreaks in the province’s poultry.
Farm workers who have been exposed to animals with bird flu should be tested for the virus even if they do not have symptoms, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Thursday.
The UK government said on Tuesday that cases of bird flu had been confirmed in commercial poultry at premises in Yorkshire, hours after it increased the risk level of the disease from medium to high.
H5N1 influenza has now been detected in pigs. This was something virologists had been worrying about ever since this highly pathogenic strain of bird flu started its rapid global spread in 2020. But why were we worrying specifically about pigs? And does this case – detected on a farm in Oregon on October 29 – change anything?
The U.S. Department of Agriculture will soon begin testing bulk raw milk across the country for bird flu, a significant expansion of the agency's efforts to stifle the rapid spread of the virus, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack told Reuters.
Bird flu has been spreading fast among poultry in the European Union this season, raising concerns of a repeat of previous crises that led to the deaths of tens of millions of poultry in the bloc and fears that it could spread to humans.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Thursday confirmed two of the four presumptive positive bird flu cases among poultry farm workers in Washington state.