The deadly H5N1 virus, bird flu, has resurfaced in poultry in Hong Kong for the first time in six years, reinforcing warnings that the threat of a human pandemic still exists.
During December, India, Bangladesh, Vietnam and mainland China also experienced new outbreaks. In that same period, four new human cases in Egypt, Cambodia and Indonesia were reported to the World Health Organization. A 16-year-old girl in Egypt and a 2-year-old girl in Indonesia have died.
The new cases come at a time when the number of confirmed human deaths from H5N1 bird flu have fallen for two years in a row and fewer countries are reporting outbreaks among poultry. A United Nations report in October credited improved surveillance and the rapid culling of potentially infected poultry for helping to contain and even prevent outbreaks in many countries.
Yet H5N1 has continued to “at the very least smolder, and many times flare up” since the outbreaks began in 2003, said Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota.
The new cases are a reminder of how quickly the situation can change as long as the H5N1 virus is still out there, Osterholm and other scientists said.
“What alarms me is that we have developed a sense of pandemic-preparedness fatigue,” he said.
H5N1 already has been a disaster for poultry farmers in Asia. Public-health officials estimate that as many as a half-billion fowl have been killed by the virus or culled to contain its spread, causing economic strain and food shortages.
But the bigger fear has always been that H5N1 would give rise to a human pandemic like the Spanish flu of 1918, which killed an estimated 50 million people worldwide.
As long as the virus continues to circulate, the threat that it could mutate to pass more easily among humans remains, the U.N. report said.
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