A Washington state resident has died after contracting a rare form of avian flu previously detected only in animals, state health officials said. This brings to two the number of deaths from the virus in the United States this year.
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The patient, identified as “an elderly person with underlying health conditions,” had been hospitalized since the beginning of the month, the state health department said Friday.
Tests carried out by the University of Washington indicated that the patient suffered from the H5N5 variant of the avian flu virus, the department said in a press release, noting that it was “the first infection recorded in a human being for this variant”.
The result was confirmed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the country’s main health agency.
“The risk to the public remains low,” authorities said. “There is no evidence of person-to-person transmission of this virus,” they added. The patient had “a domestic poultry farm in his garden”, the most likely source of the contamination.
The CDC has recorded more than 70 human cases of bird flu this year in the United States. A person died in January in Louisiana after contracting the H5N1 virus.
The World Health Organization has recorded more than 1,000 human cases of avian flu since 2003 in 25 countries, all strains combined.
