Russian authorities have reported the first known cases of a bird flu virus called H5N8 passing from birds to humans, according to reports.
Seven poultry workers were infected with the virus in December 2020, after an outbreak among flocks of birds, Anna Popova, head of Russia’s Federal Service for the Protection of Consumer Rights and Human Welfare, said at a news conference on Saturday (February 20) : according to CNN. Vector Institute scientists isolated strains of the virus from infected workers, Popova said.
Russia reported the seven cases to the World Health Organization, noting that there was no evidence of person-to-person transmission, Popova said. This means that the flu virus jumped from infected birds in people, but it did not continue to spread from human to human.
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“If confirmed, this would be the first time that H5N8 has infected people,” a WHO spokesman said in a statement, CNN said. Several strains of bird flu are known to infect people, including H5N1, H7N9 and H9N2, Reported by Reuters; but these strains never caused sustained human-to-human transmission, Live Science previously reported.
People infected with the H5N8 virus “were asymptomatic and no person-to-person transmission was reported,” confirmed the WHO spokesman, according to Reuters.
Since the virus does not seem to pass between people, it “gives all of us, the whole world, time to prepare for possible mutations and to react appropriately and in a timely manner” if transmission from person to person ever occurs in the future, Popova said at the briefing, according to BBC News.
Originally published on Live Science.