United States: Local health authorities stated on Thursday that there is no scientific evidence that bird flu is passing from person to person after analyzing a strange disease in Missouri.
No Direct Animal Contact in Missouri Case
Last month, America identified a new strain of bird flu, which was different from the 30 bird flu contagions in human beings in the United States this year. They have been observed in farmworkers who had direct contact with infected dairy cows or chickens, as reported by HealthDay.
In the Missouri case, there was no known direct contact with an infected animal, health officials said Thursday, and that is the only possible scenario.
“There is no evidence of person-to-person transmission,” said Dr. Demetre Daskalakis of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Continues to Spread Among Animals
The H5N1 bird flu is very virulent and has been affecting wild birds, poultry, cows, and several other animals in the U.S. According to officials, the increase in its occurrence raises the likelihood that individuals will encounter it and contract it.
The latest of the thirty-one human influenza cases include two employees of a commercial egg production facility in Franklin County, which is situated in southeast Washington state. The rest: There are fifteen in California and ten in Colorado, while there are only two in Michigan, one in Texas, and the odd one in Missouri. Such signs have been largely benign, including red eyes.
Testing Results
There is scarce information about the case that occurred in Missouri. He suffered from other illnesses and was admitted to the hospital in the last week of August. After the initial test showed the patient was likely to have flu, a specific flu test confirmed that the patient had influenza A, a wide category of virus. More testing indicated partial genetic sequences that resemble bird flu viruses from dairy cows in the United States.
Since the Missouri person did not work at a farm and did not report being in contact with an infected animal, authorities have sought to establish if the virus could have come from another infected person. So widespread, the disease would have been a cause of concern since it might evolve to become more infectious to humans.
They wanted to do blood work on the patient, five hospital employees, and one other person they called a ‘patient contact’ — meaning a member of the patient’s household — searching for antibodies that would confirm that someone had already been infected. The other household contact also developed stomach illness at the time the patient developed the infection but was not sampled.
Speaking on Thursday, CDC officials disclosed that the test results were negative for the healthcare workers. In one round of testing, the patient demonstrated past infection and the household contact negative signs, but in the other rounds, it was vice versa. Neither was it paltry enough to meet the World Health Organization’s blood testing standards for a bird flu case. The hence the household contact is not reckoned in the total United States figure, as reported by HealthDay.
Because they got sick simultaneously, officials think that the patient and the contact were infected by some unknown animal or animal product — excluding the possibility of the virus transmission from one of the individuals to the other, Daskalakis added.