China reports world’s first H10N3 human infection case

Recently, the Chinese government disclosed that a 41-year-old man had contracted what might be the world’s first human case of H10N3 strain of bird flu. It was quick to add that the risk of large-scale spread was, however, low.

In a world already reeling under the misery caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, the news was met with trepidation.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) said that while the source of the patient’s exposure to the H10N3 virus was not known, there are no other cases of human-to-human transmission among the local population yet.

H10N3 is a rare virus that usually affects poultry. There is a whole bunch of avian influenza viruses that have an impact on birds, and can be serious in people, such as the H7N9 strain that claimed almost 300 lives in China during the winter of 2016-2017. According to the WHO, there had been only rare instances of person-to person spread of the H7N9 virus.

Experts say that cases like the new H10N3 infection occur occasionally in China, which has huge populations of both farmed and wild birds of many species, and that with growing surveillance of avian influenza in the human population, more infections with bird flu viruses are being picked up.

In February this year, Russia reported the first human infection with the H5N8 virus that caused huge damage to poultry farms across Europe, Russia and East Asia last winter. News emerged that seven people infected with the virus were asymptomatic.

As long as avian influenza viruses circulate in poultry, sporadic infection of avian influenza in humans is not surprising. It is a vivid reminder that the threat of an influenza pandemic is persistent.

Though the H10N3 strain is not a common virus, flu viruses can mutate rapidly and mix with other strains circulating on farms or among migratory birds. This leads to “reassortment”, meaning they could make genetic changes that pose a transmission threat to humans.

The genetic sequence of the virus that infected the patient has not been released by China. Scientists are keen to know how easily H10N3 can infect human cells to determine if it could become a greater risk. They are still waiting for details.

Picture Credit : Google

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