WHO recently announced about a death due to the rare H3N8 bird flu virus, subtype of avian influenza. As per the reports, a 56-year-old Chinese woman's death is the first death due to bird flu strain that is rare in humans.
The woman was from the southern province of Guangdong and was the third person to be affected by the H3N8 subtype of avian influenza which does not normally spread among people, the United Nations body informed on Tuesday.
The first two cases of bird flu were reported last year in China and then the numbers slowly began to rise. Recently, the reported a third case, but no details about the patient's death were provided.
Though there is information that the patient had multiple underlying health conditions and she had been exposed to live poultry. This particular case was likely contracted from a wet market which the patient visited before becoming ill.
Then samples were collected from a wet market, the area where the woman visited before she became ill it was found positive for influenza A(H3), said the WHO, making a statement that it would have been the source of infection.
Though H3N8 is common in birds and rare in humans where in it cause little to no sign of disease. There were no other cases found among close contacts of the infected woman.
The official statement of WHO read, "Based on available information, it appears that this virus does not have the ability to spread easily from person to person, and therefore the risk of it spreading among humans at the national, regional, and international levels is considered to be low," the WHO said in the statement.
The WHO confirmed that the virus responsible for infection was influenza A(H3), common in birds and rare in humans. The WHO believes that this particular virus cannot easily spread among humans thus it is not dangerous or a major public health concern.
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