Two more people in mainland China have tested positive for the H5N6 bird flu virus, officials said, bringing the number of cases reported this month to eight. The recent increase in human cases has led to calls for increased surveillance.
Hong Kong’s Ministry of Health said in a statement that it had received notification of two additional cases of people in Sichuan and Zhejiang provinces. Both cases occurred earlier this month, but local officials did not immediately announce it.
The first case, a 68-year-old man from Langzhong in Sichuan Province, fell ill on January 3 and was transferred to a local hospital the following day, where he remains in critical condition. There is no word on how he was injured.
The second case is a 55-year-old woman from Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province, who fell ill on January 6 after being massacred. He was admitted to the district hospital on January 9 and remains in critical condition.
Only 67 people have been infected with H5N6 bird flu since the first confirmed case in 2014, but more than half have been reported in the past six months. Eight cases, including two deaths, have been reported so far this year.
Click here for a list of all human cases to date.
According to the World Health Organization, H5N6 bird flu is known to cause serious illness in humans of all ages and kills nearly half of those infected. No cases of human-to-human transmission have been confirmed, but a woman who tested positive last year has denied contact with live birds.
“The increasing trend of avian influenza virus infections in humans has become an important public health problem that cannot be ignored,” the researchers said in a study published in China by the CDC in September. This study highlights several mutations in two recent cases of H5N6 avian influenza.
Thijs Kuiken, professor of comparative pathology at Erasmus University Medical Center in Rotterdam, expressed concern about the rising number of cases. “The alternative might be more infectious (to humans) … or maybe there’s more of this virus in poultry at the moment and that’s why more people are getting infected,” Koiken told Reuters in October.
Earlier that month, a WHO spokesman said the risk of human-to-human transmission remains low because H5N6 does not have the ability to continue to be transmitted between people. However, the spokesman added that increased surveillance was “very much needed” to better understand the increasing number of human cases.
–
