Reports of the disease are increasingly frequent in mammals and a few weeks ago, an international team of scientists found remains of dead birds infected with HPAI virus H5N1 in the northern Wedell Sea, on the Antarctic Peninsula.
Such a finding may pose a threat to wildlife conservation, while the lately detection of bird flu outbreaks in cattle and goats in the United States, which even brought about the first ever recorded cow-to-human transmission on a farm, draws attention.
Such an scenario raised alarm among the medical community about possible mutations of the virus.
WHO warned that the H5N1 bird flu virus, which has a high mortality rate in humans but a limited transmission rate so far, is presently spreading rapidly due to factors such as climate change.
“Climate change has impacted on migratory bird routes, and this has played a role in the unprecedented spread of H5N1 in animals,” Zhang Wenqing, head of the WHO’s global influenza prevention program, said un a press conference.
Wenqinq underscored that the 2.3.4.4b variant of the virus emerged in 2020, crossed the Atlantic in 2021 to North America and in 2022 reached South America, with several outbreaks observed in recent years not only in birds, but also in mammals.
Pll/omr/lam/crc
