Dharamshala, 2nd June: The Chinese National Health Commission announced on Tuesday that 41 years old man in the eastern province of Jiangsu was the very first known human infected with a type of avian flu called H10N3. The news of the H10N3 infection comes amid the devastation of the covid-19 pandemic. Avian viruses do not normally transmit among humans, but can represent a risk to people if they combine with a human virus, Raina MacIntyre, Head of the Kirby Institute Biosecurity Program at New South Wales University, Australia, said.
The individual, a resident of Zhenjiang City, was hospitalized in a statement on 28 April when he had a fever and other symptoms. On May 28, he has diagnosed with the avian influenza H10N3 virus, although he could not explain how the man got infected with the virus. The man was stable and willing to leave the hospital. There were no other incidents of medical observation of his close contacts.
Chinese National Health Commission stated in a statement that there is no proof that the strain is capable of spreading between human beings, adding that there is “extremely minimal” danger of a serious outbreak. But given the fact that China lied by saying the Covid-19 outbreak won’t happen when Covid-19 was first diagnosed in Wuhan, take this Chinese statement as a pinch of salt. China’s National Health Commission also said that H10N3 caused less severe illness among birds.
H10N3 is a low or substantially less severe pathogenic strain of the chicken virus and the risk of large-scale propagation was very low, claimed the NHC. In China, many distinct strains of avian influenza are circulating and some people, generally those with poultry, are intermittently infected.
A different strain of bird flu, known as H7N9, led to the deaths of around 300 people during an outbreak between 2016 and 2017. Since the H7N9 virus, no large number of human bird illnesses have occurred. The NHC has indicated that there have been no such cases of human H10N3 illness worldwide before. Unlike in H7N9, there is no evidence that H10N3 can spread easily among humans.
Image Courtesy: thestar.com
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